This isn't quite a "don't think about it too much or you'll ruin it" situation, but I do admit to being less enthusiastic for this one after seeing it. It's the sort of movie that gets the job done without raising a lot of red flags while you're watching it - I mention the director's basic competence compared to the likes of Olivier Megaton et al, and that's a bigger deal than one sometimes realizes. Afterward, though, it's hard not to see the spots where it could have been better, or where it otherwise fell flat.
Seen worse, though, and got the unexpected bonus of MoviePass - whose app is apparently wobbly in different ways on my new phone than my old one - being somewhat lenient in how it enforced the 24-hour rule today - previously, you couldn't check in until the full amount of time had passed, but I was able to check into a 7pm movie at 6:40-ish despite having seen another at 7pm the night before. Handy, as I really didn't feel like killing another half-hour.
Run All Night
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2015 in Regal Fenway #11 (first-run, 4K DCP)
There's no shame in buying a ticket for Run All Night on the basis of "Liam Neeson versus Ed Harris"; the two are commanding actors who, near as I can tell, have not worked together before. In fact, they're good enough that it may take all the way until their big showdown to realize that this sort of action movie is far from the best showcase for these particular men in their mid-sixties. Do we really want to see them hobbling after each other at the climax?
Truth be told, Neeson's late-career run as an action hero has never really made sense. It started with Luc Besson matching him with a character whose greatest asset was an intimidating voice and stature, brutally finishing confrontations before his opponent knew what was happening, but every movie since Taken has tried to fit him into ever-more elaborate action sequences that he's just not suited for. And so it is here; he's not turning in his best work, but he's still convincing as a man whom a lifetime of violence has worn down, but who can summon authority when need be. It's understandable why people keep giving him these roles when the story becomes about his Jimmy Conlon, but just as obvious he should move on when the action requires him to run or exchange more than a punch or two.
Similarly, Ed Harris makes a great villain; he's got the weathered face of someone who has survived all comers and can seem to project immense conviction through his lean frame when called for. He's more suited to westerns where the ability and willingness to get the first shot is what's crucial, rather than any sustained fight or chase, but he fortunately doesn't have to be as active as Neeson does. He does well playing this sort of hard veteran, and builds every scene he's got with either Neeson or any other actor as something genuine, fueled by a good measure of grief an later fury.
Full review on EFC
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Cinderella (2015) and "Frozen Fever"
I've mentioned this before, but having nieces of movie-watching age can be really handy when you're the only forty-something man sitting by himself at certain movies. No need to explain how you have been a fan of Kenneth Branagh since Much Ago About Nothing and Cate Blanchett since Elizabeth; you can just say you're Christmas shopping.
Not that this would necessarily go over well with certain brothers and sisters-in-law, especially the ones who had a pretty good run of keeping their home a princess-free environment. I hoped about Frozen being "little-girl crack" after seeing just how much Elsa and Anna stuff was in evidence at birthdays and Christmas last year, and was assured that I really Had No Idea. I half suspect that this movie will do really well just on the basis of a Frozen sorry playing before the movie. As a person who went to Wing Commander in part to see a preview for The Phantom Menace, I cannot mock these kids.
This movie probably doesn't have quite the same addictive properties as Frozen; it isn't built around sisterhood the way that movie was, but it certainly hits the surface things well enough: Lots of pretty dresses, beautiful settings, a lovely dance, cute animals, and the like. I suppose one might like it a bit more if at least one of those dresses didn't involve a corset, but the costuming isn't exactly tacky. It's impressively non-violent, at least; a lot of movies like this would find an excuse for a swordfight, but this movie is resolute in not ever solving a problem with violence
It's funny, though - I didn't really love Maleficent last year, for a number of reasons, but that movie is a fierce blast of feminism and female empowerment in a genre that doesn't always lean that way. Cinderella doesn't have to be that, but it's got opportunities to be a bit more ambitious or relevant than it is, and it might be easier to recommend whole-heartedly if it took some of them.
"Frozen Fever"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2015 in Capitol Theatre Arlington #1 (first-run, DCP)
The last time Disney made a follow-up short to one of their features was "Tangled Ever After", and in doing so they made the smart decision to take the funny animals and make a slapstick cartoon, matching form to function. That's not happening here; Elsa is too much the breakout star of Frozen to be placed in a backup role the way Rapunzel was in that one. The trouble is, she's not exactly funny by nature, at least based upon the first feature. These seven minutes aren't really enough to re-channel the guilt she's built on in that direction, especially since you have to make Anna the sensible one in order to balance that.
It's actually not a bad direction to consider for the just-announced Frozen sequel, but here it means that the gags don't really balance with the earnest new song. When things get silly, they pick up - Elsa's sneezing spawns a new type of snow creature, frantic little guys who inevitably go after the ice cream cake that Kristoff and Olaf have been tasked with protecting, and that's pretty good slapstick. It becomes a cartoon then, which is what it needs.
One thing that's kind of interesting is seeing how just a tiny step down in this type of animation can really affect one's perception. It's safe to say that this short isn't getting the same sort of per-second budget the feature did (and doesn't need to, since the models are already in place), but the staging seems a little bit less natural, and the characters slightly less expressive. There just doesn't seem to be the same fluidity that Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, for example, retained when Disney brought them to television. As with the ho-hum song, it's just a little off, just enough to notice if not always enough to pin down.
Cinderella (2015)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2015 in Capitol Theatre Arlington #1 (first-run, DCP)
Much of Kenneth Branagh's career as a director has been spent attempting to make formal things full of dense language into broadly-entertaining movies: Lots of Shakespeare, to be certain, but also Frankenstein, Sleuth, a Mozart opera, Tom Clancy, and Thor. It's been a mixed bag, but it's still somewhat surprising that a fairy tale like Cinderella at times seems to be more constricting than any of the rest. He and the film eventually rise above that, but it's a bit of a shock that a story which has been so ripe for reinvention for so long winds up being so by-the-numbers here.
To be fair, he's a little boxed in - he hasn't been able to direct his own script in almost a decade, and Disney's spring "revival" movies are going to hew toward familiar imagery. Thus it is with this one: We're introduced to Ella (Lily James), a kind an optimistic girl who loses both her mother (Hayley Atwell) and father (Ben Chaplin), but not before the latter has remarried, and this stepmother (Cate Blanchett) arrives with two daughters of her own (Holliday Grainger & Sophie McShera), banishing Ella to the attic and (laid-off) servant's quarters. She meets a handsome prince (Richard Madden) in the forest, not realizing Kit's true position, and while her stepfamily tries to prevent her from attending the ball that the prince has opened to all of the land's maidens, a fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) gives her a chance to attend in style, although the magic will wear off at midnight.
I feel silly recounting the plot of Cinderella, but it demonstrates how the film winds up in a similar position - we know this story, and both Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz struggle with that familiarity. While plenty happens to get Ella to the point where the main activity of the plot really kicks off, she is a fairly passive character through much of it, and there winds up being a lot of narration and baldly laying out the philosophy that she and her parents shared. We know all this, and the filmmakers know we know it, but there are only so many distinctive details they can fit in without bending it too much. Those bits feel like little nubs where branches have been broken off the main limbs of the tree, leaving behind interesting signs that something could grow there but little else. The narration isn't the only source of wit here, but wordplay is one of the few ways things can be spiced up.
Full review on EFC
Not that this would necessarily go over well with certain brothers and sisters-in-law, especially the ones who had a pretty good run of keeping their home a princess-free environment. I hoped about Frozen being "little-girl crack" after seeing just how much Elsa and Anna stuff was in evidence at birthdays and Christmas last year, and was assured that I really Had No Idea. I half suspect that this movie will do really well just on the basis of a Frozen sorry playing before the movie. As a person who went to Wing Commander in part to see a preview for The Phantom Menace, I cannot mock these kids.
This movie probably doesn't have quite the same addictive properties as Frozen; it isn't built around sisterhood the way that movie was, but it certainly hits the surface things well enough: Lots of pretty dresses, beautiful settings, a lovely dance, cute animals, and the like. I suppose one might like it a bit more if at least one of those dresses didn't involve a corset, but the costuming isn't exactly tacky. It's impressively non-violent, at least; a lot of movies like this would find an excuse for a swordfight, but this movie is resolute in not ever solving a problem with violence
It's funny, though - I didn't really love Maleficent last year, for a number of reasons, but that movie is a fierce blast of feminism and female empowerment in a genre that doesn't always lean that way. Cinderella doesn't have to be that, but it's got opportunities to be a bit more ambitious or relevant than it is, and it might be easier to recommend whole-heartedly if it took some of them.
"Frozen Fever"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2015 in Capitol Theatre Arlington #1 (first-run, DCP)
The last time Disney made a follow-up short to one of their features was "Tangled Ever After", and in doing so they made the smart decision to take the funny animals and make a slapstick cartoon, matching form to function. That's not happening here; Elsa is too much the breakout star of Frozen to be placed in a backup role the way Rapunzel was in that one. The trouble is, she's not exactly funny by nature, at least based upon the first feature. These seven minutes aren't really enough to re-channel the guilt she's built on in that direction, especially since you have to make Anna the sensible one in order to balance that.
It's actually not a bad direction to consider for the just-announced Frozen sequel, but here it means that the gags don't really balance with the earnest new song. When things get silly, they pick up - Elsa's sneezing spawns a new type of snow creature, frantic little guys who inevitably go after the ice cream cake that Kristoff and Olaf have been tasked with protecting, and that's pretty good slapstick. It becomes a cartoon then, which is what it needs.
One thing that's kind of interesting is seeing how just a tiny step down in this type of animation can really affect one's perception. It's safe to say that this short isn't getting the same sort of per-second budget the feature did (and doesn't need to, since the models are already in place), but the staging seems a little bit less natural, and the characters slightly less expressive. There just doesn't seem to be the same fluidity that Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, for example, retained when Disney brought them to television. As with the ho-hum song, it's just a little off, just enough to notice if not always enough to pin down.
Cinderella (2015)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2015 in Capitol Theatre Arlington #1 (first-run, DCP)
Much of Kenneth Branagh's career as a director has been spent attempting to make formal things full of dense language into broadly-entertaining movies: Lots of Shakespeare, to be certain, but also Frankenstein, Sleuth, a Mozart opera, Tom Clancy, and Thor. It's been a mixed bag, but it's still somewhat surprising that a fairy tale like Cinderella at times seems to be more constricting than any of the rest. He and the film eventually rise above that, but it's a bit of a shock that a story which has been so ripe for reinvention for so long winds up being so by-the-numbers here.
To be fair, he's a little boxed in - he hasn't been able to direct his own script in almost a decade, and Disney's spring "revival" movies are going to hew toward familiar imagery. Thus it is with this one: We're introduced to Ella (Lily James), a kind an optimistic girl who loses both her mother (Hayley Atwell) and father (Ben Chaplin), but not before the latter has remarried, and this stepmother (Cate Blanchett) arrives with two daughters of her own (Holliday Grainger & Sophie McShera), banishing Ella to the attic and (laid-off) servant's quarters. She meets a handsome prince (Richard Madden) in the forest, not realizing Kit's true position, and while her stepfamily tries to prevent her from attending the ball that the prince has opened to all of the land's maidens, a fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) gives her a chance to attend in style, although the magic will wear off at midnight.
I feel silly recounting the plot of Cinderella, but it demonstrates how the film winds up in a similar position - we know this story, and both Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz struggle with that familiarity. While plenty happens to get Ella to the point where the main activity of the plot really kicks off, she is a fairly passive character through much of it, and there winds up being a lot of narration and baldly laying out the philosophy that she and her parents shared. We know all this, and the filmmakers know we know it, but there are only so many distinctive details they can fit in without bending it too much. Those bits feel like little nubs where branches have been broken off the main limbs of the tree, leaving behind interesting signs that something could grow there but little else. The narration isn't the only source of wit here, but wordplay is one of the few ways things can be spiced up.
Full review on EFC
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 March 2015 - 19 March 2015
Things seem to be approaching normal for a bit right now - nothing way out of left field, a manageable amount of new releases, little see-it-now-or-else insanity.
My plans: Cinderella, Run All Night, '71, The Wrecking Crew, and maybe Arsenic and Old Lace and God Told Me To. And, who am I kidding, I'll probably see Avengers Grimm as well.
- The latest Disney animated classic to get a live-action remake is Cinderella, with Lily James in the title role, Cate Blanchett as the wicked stepmother, Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother, and a pretty nifty cast around them, too. Kenneth Branagh directs, and I really hope that all the studio-franchise work he's been doing over the past few years is a plot to earn enough goodwill to get an Imax 3D full-text version of MacBeth with an all-star cast into production. It's preceded by a short starring the cast of Frozen, which will probably get a lot of kids into the theater on its own. It plays at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture, Fenway (including RPX), Boston Common (including Imax), Assembly Row (including Imax), and Revere (including XPlus).
On the other side of the spectrum, Liam Neeson does another action movie with Jaume Collet-Serra, this time playing a hitman facing off crime boss against Ed Harris in Run All Night. Fun supporting cast, too, with Bruce McGill, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Common. This one plays the Capitol, Embassy, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. - A more limited release is in store for '71, which stars Jack O'Connell as a British soldier separated from his unit in 1971 Belfast, a pretty hairy situation. It's at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common; the Tuesday 7:15pm screening at the Coolidge is an "Off the Couch" screening with members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, which sounds like a fantastic Saint Patrick's Day treat.
The Coolidge also picks up What We Do in the Shadows for the smaller rooms, in case you haven't caught it yet. The midnight show on Friday and Saturday is a new digital restoration of the uncensored God Told Me To, Larry Cohen's 1976 horror movie about connected spree killers who believe they are doing the Lord's work. There's a second midnight on Saturday, Brain Damage, this one a 35mm print of a 1988 movie by Frank Henenlotter. It's presented by the Arkham Film Society, and the print is incredibly rare.
There's also a kid's show of Fantastic Mr. Fox on Saturday morning, and a Science On Screen presentation of Arsenic and Old Lace on Monday. It's on 35mm and Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, will introduce it, probably not discussing old lace. Then on Thursday, the Francophone Film Festival in the screening room is Monsieur l'Economiste, out of Haiti. - Kendall Square loads up on documentaries along with '71. The big one is probably Red Army, which looks at the Red Army Hockey Team, the most successful dynasty in sports history, and how it was both a powerful symbol of the Soviet Union and beholden to it. Another dynasty of sorts is shown in The Wrecking Crew, a documentary about the group of Los Angeles studio musicians who had an enormous and little-publicized impact on the "west coast sound" of the 1960s and 1970s, playing on six consecutive Grammy Record of the Year winners. It's booked for one week.
Rounding out the trio is The Hunting Ground, the latest from Kirby Dick, which catalogs the staggering number of sexual assaults on college campuses and the institutional cover-ups which make things even harder on the victims. Producer Amy Ziering will be there for Q&As after the 7:05 screenings on Friday and Saturday. - West Newton will have two screenings a day of Deli Man; no points for guessing what this is a documentary about.
- The Brattle has an even stranger schedule that usual this week. For instance, the main show from Friday to Monday is a new restoration of Eric Rohmer's A Tale of Winter, which is, well, an eric Rohmer film. Then at 9:30pm, there will be a different Bloody Fantasy each night - Dragonslayer (35mm, Friday), John Boorman's Excalibur (Saturday), Conan the Barbarian (Sunday), and Albert Pyun's The Sword & the Sorcerer (35mm, Monday).
Then on Tuesday, the monthly Trash Night screening - T-Force - is followed by Avengers Grimm, a fairy-tale mashup by the modern practitioners of cheap knock-offs, The Asylum. Gears are then once again quickly shifted for two nights of Growing Up Baumbach: A triple feature of The Squid and the Whale, Kicking and Screaming, and Frances Ha on Wednesday and a preview of While We're Young with writer/director Noah Baumbach in person on Thursday. - Subtitles return to Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe with NH-10, a thriller starring Anushka Sharma as a woman who just barely survives an attack on the street who, along with her boyfriend (Neil Bhoopalam) comes across a girl being attacked in the middle of the desert.
- The Harvard Film Archive begins a new retrospective - Life in Real Time: The Cinema of Lav Diaz on Friday with the 4-plus-hour Norte, the End of History, and that looks like one of the shorter ones he's done, as Florentina Hubaldo, CTE on Sunday runs six hours!
A second begins on Saturday, although To the Beat of Shirley Clarke doesn't look like it involves marathons, although there are two films on Saturday, Portrait of Jason and The Connection, both in 35mm. A third entry, The Cool World, plays in 16mm on Monday. After that, "Furious Cinema" continues on Wednesday with a 35mm print of Mauriece Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together. - The Museum of Fine Artscontinues showing New Latin American Cinema, including Argentina's History of Fear (Friday/Wednesday) , Princess of France (Saturday/Wednesday), and Natural Sciences (Sunday/Wednesday); Brazil contributes Obra (Friday). The Tuesday afternoon film is Pollock, and the 14th Annual Boston Turkish Film Festival starts on Thursday with Winter Sleep.
- The Regent Theatre will be showing Farewell Herr Schwarz on Tuesday; it's a documentary by Yael Reuveny about how two brothers (one her grandfather) settled in East Germany and Israel after the Holocaust, neither knowing the other was alive, until Reuveny started digging into her family history.
- The Bright Lights program at Emerson's Paramount Theater Bright Screening room on Tuesday is Who Is Vermin Supreme? An Outsider Odyssey, with director Stephen Onderick and the Presidential candidate/performance artist of the title in peson.
- The ICA will be showing the program of live-action shorts from the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday.
- And, finally, the Irish Film Festival Boston kicks of at Somerville Theatre on Thursday night with their Best Feature winner Gold, about a man trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend and daughter after 12 years. It's preceded by Best Short winner "Boogaloo and Graham" (one of this year's Oscar nominees), and the directors of both will be on-hand for a Q&A.
My plans: Cinderella, Run All Night, '71, The Wrecking Crew, and maybe Arsenic and Old Lace and God Told Me To. And, who am I kidding, I'll probably see Avengers Grimm as well.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
This Week In Tickets: 1 February 2015 - 7 February 2015
Festival starts this week, falling behind happens.
That falling behind is made even more intense by trying to fit a lot of stuff in before the festival as Oscar prep. That started with a long afternoon and evening split between the two small screens at the Coolidge, watching the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts. As expected, they were a great group, but heavy. Poland, in particular, dropped a heck of a complementary downer, a mother with cancer on the one hand and a baby with a horrifying illnesses on the other.
The plan was probably to continue that the next night, but it looks like I stayed at work a bit too late and wouldn't have reached Kendall Square in time, so I got off the Red Line at Davis and checked out A Most Violent Year at the Somerville. That one was released like an awards contender, but didn't get much in the way of nominations, probably because it came out at the very end of the window and didn't get seen much. Shame, because it's kind of excellent.
Tuesday, it was back on the short-film path, doing a double-feature at the Kendall. First came the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts, a short break, and then the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts. As you might expect, it was all pretty good stuff. The expected things wound up winning, but there are a lot of other good things in the package.
A couple days later, I ws considering just resting up for the festival, but then I read an article saying that Running Man was the highest-grossing movie in the world the previous week, and got curious. Satisfying that curiosity was not exactly a mistake, but it wasn't good at all, a drama-free super-sized reality show episode.
After that, the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival started, with Robot Overlords & Alien Outpost the first night and a full slate of Max Mercury, "Painting the Way to the Moon", The History of Time Travel, Uncanny, and Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two on Saturday. Pretty uneven, but some interesting things in there, especially on Saturday.
That falling behind is made even more intense by trying to fit a lot of stuff in before the festival as Oscar prep. That started with a long afternoon and evening split between the two small screens at the Coolidge, watching the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts. As expected, they were a great group, but heavy. Poland, in particular, dropped a heck of a complementary downer, a mother with cancer on the one hand and a baby with a horrifying illnesses on the other.
The plan was probably to continue that the next night, but it looks like I stayed at work a bit too late and wouldn't have reached Kendall Square in time, so I got off the Red Line at Davis and checked out A Most Violent Year at the Somerville. That one was released like an awards contender, but didn't get much in the way of nominations, probably because it came out at the very end of the window and didn't get seen much. Shame, because it's kind of excellent.
Tuesday, it was back on the short-film path, doing a double-feature at the Kendall. First came the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts, a short break, and then the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts. As you might expect, it was all pretty good stuff. The expected things wound up winning, but there are a lot of other good things in the package.
A couple days later, I ws considering just resting up for the festival, but then I read an article saying that Running Man was the highest-grossing movie in the world the previous week, and got curious. Satisfying that curiosity was not exactly a mistake, but it wasn't good at all, a drama-free super-sized reality show episode.
After that, the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival started, with Robot Overlords & Alien Outpost the first night and a full slate of Max Mercury, "Painting the Way to the Moon", The History of Time Travel, Uncanny, and Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two on Saturday. Pretty uneven, but some interesting things in there, especially on Saturday.
Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #04: Boy 7
It's been a bit over a month, and we've had warm enough temperatures to see some melting over the part few days, so if anybody reading this has forgotten how much February sucked weather-wise, let me remind you: It was terrible, and it brought the MBTA to its knees. Mondays tended to be the worst, and in this case, after working from home, the sensible decision would have been to skip a night or two of the festival, especially since the subway was going to shut down while I was in the theater, making the trip home more difficult.
But I paid money for this festival pass, and it was unlikely that this screening would be made up at any time I could see it (the original plan actually turned out to be that it would, but I'll get to that mess). So I took the Red Line to Davis Square, bought some snacks to make opening a little more worth the Somerville Theatre's effort, and sat down.
The movie began several minutes early. There were no subtitles, a problem, as it is from The Netherlands and Nederlander doesn't overlap much with English at all.
Realizing it had started too early, the guys at the theater stopped it, two more folks arrived, and then it started again on time. Still no subtitles. At that point, I admit, we engaged in some of the behavior I would normally castigate others for in just about any other situation: We talked, sometimes making jokes and sometimes just confirming that what we thought was going on was really going on (the jokes kind of help with that, maybe as a way of confirming that we were following the action without it becoming a conversation that really pulls our attention from the action and subtitles). We pulled out phones and tablets, downloaded the proper language sets for Google Translate, and pointed the microphones at the screen, but to no avail. Either the lousy reception in the underground theater - my old phone did better connecting to a weak Comcast WiFi signal than Verizon 4G there, and the situation is not much different with the new one - or the likely case that the phone is built to pick up sound from inches away rather than even the loudest background noise kept that plan from working.
The next night, we would learn that Garen had intended to play it in the Marathon - I'm not sure whether that plan came before or after realizing that the snow would keep all but the stupidest of us away from what he was billing as a world premiere - but having a DCP with no subs apparently scorched that plan. That's too bad; it's a slick, decent little movie that will probably make no sort of impression on America at all, and what's a film festival for if not to give people a chance to see something good that the regular schedules won't play?
Eventually, it ended, we had a laugh about the weird experience, and headed home. For me, that initially meant heading across the street to catch the 91 bus back to Harvard Square, which is a relatively short walk from my house, but it never showed, just disappearing from the bus tracking app on my phone after being marked as arriving in two minutes for a solid quarter-hour. So I walked home. Not as hard as you would think - the snow want coming down very hard by that point, the wind was mild, and both Somerville and Cambridge are pretty good about cleaning off sidewalks. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, though, and it's probably more effort than this movie (in this form) and event deserves. Of course, in a few months/years, this will just be an anecdote I tell to people who don't realize how good they have it when attending a film festival.
Boy 7
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
It's probably best to disclose this up front rather than as a "hey, guess what?" thing at the end: Through some sort of series of miscommunications and other slip-ups, Boy 7 was shown without subtitles, and rescheduling was more or less impossible what with the blizzards that hit New England that month. Given the choice of seeing it that way and not seeing it all after dragging myself out in the snow, I bought some popcorn and settled in. Please keep the fact that I don't speak Dutch in mind if you continue reading, perhaps pondering the question of whether the fact that I feel confident enough to write the review owes to director Lourens Blok doing a fine job of communicating through action and visuals or the story itself just being predictable enough that you don't need to hear the words.
It starts, more or less, with a young man (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen) regaining consciousness on the Subway just before all hell breaks loose. His memory lost, he escapes with Lara (Ella-June Henrard), a girl who possesses the same extraordinary urban combat skills he does and tells him that his name is Sam. Between what she tells him and a journal he apparently handed off for safekeeping, he discovers that they were juvenile offenders with high-level skills (he was a hacker) trained to be super-agents, although Sam, Lara, and Sam's roommate Louis (Yannick Jozefzoon) smelled a rat and attempted to plot an escape.
This all comes in flashbacks that I presume are triggered by Sam reading his diary, although it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether those memories returning in such clear, linear fashion or the diary being phenomenally detailed is more unlikely. It's not actually a bad storytelling device, but it creaks at times - there is certainly more than one moment when Dam seems to be writing in the notebook because he expects to lose his memory at some point in the near future. Given the apparent brainwashing going on, it's not a totally unreasonable idea, although one would think he'd highlight certain things. To be fair, they are things that the perfectly obvious to the audience well before Sam catches on. Maybe he just had a higher expectation of his own intelligence than screenwriters Marco van Geffen and Philip del Maar (working from a novel by Mirjam Mous) did.
Full review at EFC.
But I paid money for this festival pass, and it was unlikely that this screening would be made up at any time I could see it (the original plan actually turned out to be that it would, but I'll get to that mess). So I took the Red Line to Davis Square, bought some snacks to make opening a little more worth the Somerville Theatre's effort, and sat down.
The movie began several minutes early. There were no subtitles, a problem, as it is from The Netherlands and Nederlander doesn't overlap much with English at all.
Realizing it had started too early, the guys at the theater stopped it, two more folks arrived, and then it started again on time. Still no subtitles. At that point, I admit, we engaged in some of the behavior I would normally castigate others for in just about any other situation: We talked, sometimes making jokes and sometimes just confirming that what we thought was going on was really going on (the jokes kind of help with that, maybe as a way of confirming that we were following the action without it becoming a conversation that really pulls our attention from the action and subtitles). We pulled out phones and tablets, downloaded the proper language sets for Google Translate, and pointed the microphones at the screen, but to no avail. Either the lousy reception in the underground theater - my old phone did better connecting to a weak Comcast WiFi signal than Verizon 4G there, and the situation is not much different with the new one - or the likely case that the phone is built to pick up sound from inches away rather than even the loudest background noise kept that plan from working.
The next night, we would learn that Garen had intended to play it in the Marathon - I'm not sure whether that plan came before or after realizing that the snow would keep all but the stupidest of us away from what he was billing as a world premiere - but having a DCP with no subs apparently scorched that plan. That's too bad; it's a slick, decent little movie that will probably make no sort of impression on America at all, and what's a film festival for if not to give people a chance to see something good that the regular schedules won't play?
Eventually, it ended, we had a laugh about the weird experience, and headed home. For me, that initially meant heading across the street to catch the 91 bus back to Harvard Square, which is a relatively short walk from my house, but it never showed, just disappearing from the bus tracking app on my phone after being marked as arriving in two minutes for a solid quarter-hour. So I walked home. Not as hard as you would think - the snow want coming down very hard by that point, the wind was mild, and both Somerville and Cambridge are pretty good about cleaning off sidewalks. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, though, and it's probably more effort than this movie (in this form) and event deserves. Of course, in a few months/years, this will just be an anecdote I tell to people who don't realize how good they have it when attending a film festival.
Boy 7
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, DCP)
It's probably best to disclose this up front rather than as a "hey, guess what?" thing at the end: Through some sort of series of miscommunications and other slip-ups, Boy 7 was shown without subtitles, and rescheduling was more or less impossible what with the blizzards that hit New England that month. Given the choice of seeing it that way and not seeing it all after dragging myself out in the snow, I bought some popcorn and settled in. Please keep the fact that I don't speak Dutch in mind if you continue reading, perhaps pondering the question of whether the fact that I feel confident enough to write the review owes to director Lourens Blok doing a fine job of communicating through action and visuals or the story itself just being predictable enough that you don't need to hear the words.
It starts, more or less, with a young man (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen) regaining consciousness on the Subway just before all hell breaks loose. His memory lost, he escapes with Lara (Ella-June Henrard), a girl who possesses the same extraordinary urban combat skills he does and tells him that his name is Sam. Between what she tells him and a journal he apparently handed off for safekeeping, he discovers that they were juvenile offenders with high-level skills (he was a hacker) trained to be super-agents, although Sam, Lara, and Sam's roommate Louis (Yannick Jozefzoon) smelled a rat and attempted to plot an escape.
This all comes in flashbacks that I presume are triggered by Sam reading his diary, although it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether those memories returning in such clear, linear fashion or the diary being phenomenally detailed is more unlikely. It's not actually a bad storytelling device, but it creaks at times - there is certainly more than one moment when Dam seems to be writing in the notebook because he expects to lose his memory at some point in the near future. Given the apparent brainwashing going on, it's not a totally unreasonable idea, although one would think he'd highlight certain things. To be fair, they are things that the perfectly obvious to the audience well before Sam catches on. Maybe he just had a higher expectation of his own intelligence than screenwriters Marco van Geffen and Philip del Maar (working from a novel by Mirjam Mous) did.
Full review at EFC.
Monday, March 09, 2015
Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #03: "Limbo", Mythica: A Quest for Heroes, Blessid & Shadows on the Wall
I honestly do try not to be cynical going into this event, but when the line-up reads "web series, crowd-funded fantasy, local production, thing by the guy who made that movie we really hated a couple years ago"... It's not that I don't believe in internet distribution, true indies, or second chances, but those are all things where, at least right now in 2015, a certain amount of skepticism is not entirely unwarranted.
Here's what we saw:
"The Hypnotist"
"2043"
"Limbo"
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
Blessid
Shadows on the Wall
Given that Blessid was the local production, it's no surprise that it was the most crowded show of the day as folks involved in the production and their friends came. It always makes for a weird Q&A, as some of the questions are fairly obscure for outsiders.
That's festival honcho Garen Daly, director Rob Fitz, and writer Robert Henske. They seem like nice folks.
A lot of talk from Garen about how playing this festival helped Blessid get into some festivals in Europe, which is nice, I guess, although I'm not sure how excited those of us in the audience are supposed to be because of it.
After a rough start, it was a decent enough day. You'd like a four-slot day at a festival to include something more than decent, but better-than-expected doesn't feel bad, especially when it's snowing when you get out and things are going to be ugly all week.
"The Hypnotist"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Person enters dreams of comatose patient" is a science-fiction movie that has been made a lot, and for good reason - it lets everyone involved create some really cool visual stuff, and you can just see a filmmaker's eagerness to show just how symbolic everything is. There are no rules, but everything is full of meaning.
"The Hypnotist" isn't a bad example of one, although it strikes me as being more inspired by video games than actual dream imagery, as Elijah (Brandon Wardell), the inventor of this technique, fights through a zombie-infested haunted house to reach his comatose wife Gwen (Heidi Rhodes), although his own ghosts are chasing him. It feels very mission/game-oriented, right down to a failure sending him back to a spawning point. That does play into the strengths of writer/director Jon Braver, a stuntman who doesn't necessarily put his cast through the wringer, but does seem to have picked a thing or two about directing action up in his time on the other side of the camera.
He and co-writer Will Shivers do a pretty fair job of paying the story down to the bare necessities, too: Once the opening exposition is finished, there's not much time spent on explanation. It's a pretty thin line between the story being perfunctory and efficiently-told, in that there could be more to it but the technique is quite good. Something to build upon if he opts to do more and bigger films, at least.
"2043"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"2043" is another short trying to tell a lot by just throwing the audience into it, positing aworld where, in the aftermath of a 28 Days Later-style plague, human contact is forbidden. Jack (Rowan Davie) has a soul-crushing job aiding in the disposal of those infected who have broken the rule, and pines for Milla (Tegan Crowley), who has no interest in a relationship where there is always a layer of plastic between you and the one you love.
Had this been made twenty or thirty years ago, it might have seemed to be about how the fear of AIDS and other venereal diseases has made people paranoid about physical contact; now one can't help but think of people packed tight together and interacting at a remove, taunting themselves with flesh they will never touch (or Pushing Daisies). Neither is a perfect metaphor, nor is the simple idea of being too afraid of consequences to act; the danger is too real, making the romantic ending seem a little too willfully tragic.
Still, writer/director Eugenie Muggleton and her crew do a nice job of building their world up. It's a grimy, miserable dystopia that kinds of feels like a rigged game - creating such a horrible situation that a soul-crushing authoritarian government is arguably necessary and then decrying how awful it is - but which seems like it has the details thought out well. Davie and Crowley play characters overwhelmed with disappointment and resignation, but do it with a feeling of personal history and perspective.
"Limbo"
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Limbo" played directly after two sorts that did impressive jobs of building their worlds despite not having much in the way of time or budget, and seemed to be going for something similar. Instead, this web-series pilot/student film comes off as merely unforthcoming, and it doesn't have the sort of polish to get by on what it does reveal.
The basics of the story are relatively easy to suss out - certain people from our world are capable of traveling to another where people who have mysteriously vanish reside; the lost are beset by horrors and the seekers appear to do what they do for a price. One of these "saviors" enters Limbo, gets separated from his party, and may be trapped there. He and the people he falls in with try and survive and find their way home.
There are a few problems with "Limbo", but the big one is that writer and co-director Ben R. Johnson seems kind of presumptuous in how he doles out his world's mythology. There's something to be said for throwing the audience in and letting them figure it out as they go, but there's something even better to be said for making sure that when danger presents itself, the viewer is roughly as able to consider the circumstances and get invested in the outcome as the characters. Johnson and his cast spend a lot of time referring to things in capital letters, referencing backstory, or introducing new elements without giving the audience something concrete to attach them to. You need that sort of grounding or payoff unless you're making this for an audience that is already familiar with your world, and I'm not sure that this is the case.
Beyond that, though, Johnson and co-director Joshua Demeulle just don't have the resources and practice to pull it off. Nobody has a strong and interesting personality, and the use of black-and-white to represent Limbo simply becomes drab without more color for contrast. The pacing is also a real problem; the presentation at the festival seemed like neither a single 42-minute TV episode built for commercial breaks nor a compilation of shorter webisodes. The focus shifted as if it were the latter, but there was no point, either at a long fade to black or the very end, where it felt like something was accomplished. You need those chapter breaks that feel like some progress has been made even as they make one curious about what will happen next, even if you have planned something much more serial out.
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
It may not always seem to be the case, but what an aspiring filmmaker can do today is pretty extraordinary, and not just in terms of there being more compact and affordable hardware available for shooting, editing, and creating visual effects than ever before. There are platforms for showing what you are capable of and developing a fanbase, getting in touch with potential collaborators, and even raising money. Here's the thing, though: Between that and the scaling-up that the big studios are doing, those aspiring filmmakers now want to do more. That's why something like Mythica: A Quest for Heroes has a colon in its title and occasionally looks a little stretched on-screen. Writer/director Anne K. Black has the tools at her disposal to make a decent fantasy movie, but wants to make more, and wants the one she's got to be even bigger.
That's not unreasonable. The world of Mythica is a fairly standard swords-and-sorcery world - a medieval level of technology with a select few able to perform magic, mostly populated by human beings but worth the occasional orc or dwarf showing up - but Black still had to establish the bounds on that magic, the rivalries that drive conflicts in that world, and a whole raft of other things that could swallow one movie whole if not parceled out a bit. If you're going to make bigger plans for the world, you might as well make bigger plans for your characters. The trick, which Black and her co-writers Jason Faller & Kynan Griffin generally manage to pull off, it's making the first installment satisfying enough to encourage viewers to come back because they like what they see, as opposed to just relying on the fantasy fan's compulsion to see any story out to the end.
That includes things which start or feeling like someone else's game of Dungeons & Dragons, which is the case here. The leaders of the assembled party are Marek (Melanie Stone), a club-footed slave who has a natural aptitude for magic, and Teela (Nicola Posener), a priestess who was the only one to escape when her temple was destroyed. When circumstances make Marek a fugitive and no other adventurer is willing to help Teela, they join forces, recruiting swordsman Thane (Adam Johnson) and thief Dagen (Jake Stormoen) to help rescue Teela's sister from the mercenaries and monsters that have taken her.
Full review at EFC.
Blessid
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
Sometimes it's hard to give a movie a fair shake, no matter how much it may deserve one. I saw a flat-out great movie with a similar idea just a couple weeks before seeing Blessid, so I wanted it to do more with its premise as soon as it showed its hand. It never managed that, and while I think that its relatively small ambitions do hurt it, knowing just what else could be done shouldn't diminish what it does have going for it.
That would be the performances of the leads. Neither Rachel Kerbs nor Rick Montgomery Jr. is charged with giving a showy, theatrical performance, but each is able to get across a great deal of what makes his or her character tick in gestures and body language. Get the pair in a room together, and they do a nice job of revealing themselves even if they are trying to ferret information out about one another. The older Montgomery is clearly more experienced than Kerbs, and also given material where his Jedediah Cross gets to come across as more than he appears to be, but she more than holds her own, even when not paired with castmates not so skilled as Montgomery.
That's the case for a while at the start, when pregnant, depressed, and even suicidal Sarah Duncliffe (Kerbs) is prescribed bed rest for her physical and mental health. Her husband Edward (Gene Silvers) is the sort of man who thinks he's doing her a favor that merits more gratitude by being married to her, and the ex-boyfriend she was having an affair with right around the time that the baby was conceived (Chris Devecchio) is hanging around a lot when Edward is not around. Cross has just moved into a long-empty house across the street, and initially just wants to be left alone, but the retiree is the only person Sarah has to talk to, and the only one watching when Sarah's symptoms expand to include sleepwalking.
Full review at EFC.
Shadows on the Wall
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
There's a vibe to Shadows on the Wall that suggests filmmaker Benjamin Carland is trying to make a Primer, not just something with big ideas but a small cast and budget, but a tactile feel. Something where all the exposed workings and dense terminology gives the movie credibility, and a feeling of being slightly overwhelmed is something to be pushed through rather than discouraged by. There are moments when he's pointed in the right direction and the audience feels the intended thrill, and if they outnumbered the ones that just didn't make sense, he would have made a fairly impressive bit of low-budget sci-fi.
He starts out with two roommates at a smallish college: Palmer Marshall (Chris Kauffmann) is a socially stunted introvert who books nonfunctional assemblies out of spare parts, and his cousin Chase (Tim Fox), there to have fun more than learn. Despite Palmer's apparent ability with electronics, he needs help to pass his freshman math classes, which is why his parents hire Alice (Nicole Lee Durant), who eventually joins him on working on his latest device, which Chase helps bankroll. And while it doesn't do what Palmer intended, what it does do is extraordinary on its own.
When Carland gets to that point, when the extraordinary starts to happen, it's hard to deny that the movie works. The undergraduate genius making a breakthrough isn't as popular a trope as it once was - the process of science has become less mysterious and the tools more specialized - but it's still a story that strikes a chord because everyone would love to discover something that is less hidden than in a place nobody has looked before. Carland handles the moments of discovery well, speeding things up as the characters learn more, always keeping the next thing tantalizingly close and making sure that, as big as it is, it's something the audience can grasp.
Full review at EFC.
Here's what we saw:
"The Hypnotist"
"2043"
"Limbo"
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
Blessid
Shadows on the Wall
Given that Blessid was the local production, it's no surprise that it was the most crowded show of the day as folks involved in the production and their friends came. It always makes for a weird Q&A, as some of the questions are fairly obscure for outsiders.
That's festival honcho Garen Daly, director Rob Fitz, and writer Robert Henske. They seem like nice folks.
A lot of talk from Garen about how playing this festival helped Blessid get into some festivals in Europe, which is nice, I guess, although I'm not sure how excited those of us in the audience are supposed to be because of it.
After a rough start, it was a decent enough day. You'd like a four-slot day at a festival to include something more than decent, but better-than-expected doesn't feel bad, especially when it's snowing when you get out and things are going to be ugly all week.
"The Hypnotist"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Person enters dreams of comatose patient" is a science-fiction movie that has been made a lot, and for good reason - it lets everyone involved create some really cool visual stuff, and you can just see a filmmaker's eagerness to show just how symbolic everything is. There are no rules, but everything is full of meaning.
"The Hypnotist" isn't a bad example of one, although it strikes me as being more inspired by video games than actual dream imagery, as Elijah (Brandon Wardell), the inventor of this technique, fights through a zombie-infested haunted house to reach his comatose wife Gwen (Heidi Rhodes), although his own ghosts are chasing him. It feels very mission/game-oriented, right down to a failure sending him back to a spawning point. That does play into the strengths of writer/director Jon Braver, a stuntman who doesn't necessarily put his cast through the wringer, but does seem to have picked a thing or two about directing action up in his time on the other side of the camera.
He and co-writer Will Shivers do a pretty fair job of paying the story down to the bare necessities, too: Once the opening exposition is finished, there's not much time spent on explanation. It's a pretty thin line between the story being perfunctory and efficiently-told, in that there could be more to it but the technique is quite good. Something to build upon if he opts to do more and bigger films, at least.
"2043"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"2043" is another short trying to tell a lot by just throwing the audience into it, positing aworld where, in the aftermath of a 28 Days Later-style plague, human contact is forbidden. Jack (Rowan Davie) has a soul-crushing job aiding in the disposal of those infected who have broken the rule, and pines for Milla (Tegan Crowley), who has no interest in a relationship where there is always a layer of plastic between you and the one you love.
Had this been made twenty or thirty years ago, it might have seemed to be about how the fear of AIDS and other venereal diseases has made people paranoid about physical contact; now one can't help but think of people packed tight together and interacting at a remove, taunting themselves with flesh they will never touch (or Pushing Daisies). Neither is a perfect metaphor, nor is the simple idea of being too afraid of consequences to act; the danger is too real, making the romantic ending seem a little too willfully tragic.
Still, writer/director Eugenie Muggleton and her crew do a nice job of building their world up. It's a grimy, miserable dystopia that kinds of feels like a rigged game - creating such a horrible situation that a soul-crushing authoritarian government is arguably necessary and then decrying how awful it is - but which seems like it has the details thought out well. Davie and Crowley play characters overwhelmed with disappointment and resignation, but do it with a feeling of personal history and perspective.
"Limbo"
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Limbo" played directly after two sorts that did impressive jobs of building their worlds despite not having much in the way of time or budget, and seemed to be going for something similar. Instead, this web-series pilot/student film comes off as merely unforthcoming, and it doesn't have the sort of polish to get by on what it does reveal.
The basics of the story are relatively easy to suss out - certain people from our world are capable of traveling to another where people who have mysteriously vanish reside; the lost are beset by horrors and the seekers appear to do what they do for a price. One of these "saviors" enters Limbo, gets separated from his party, and may be trapped there. He and the people he falls in with try and survive and find their way home.
There are a few problems with "Limbo", but the big one is that writer and co-director Ben R. Johnson seems kind of presumptuous in how he doles out his world's mythology. There's something to be said for throwing the audience in and letting them figure it out as they go, but there's something even better to be said for making sure that when danger presents itself, the viewer is roughly as able to consider the circumstances and get invested in the outcome as the characters. Johnson and his cast spend a lot of time referring to things in capital letters, referencing backstory, or introducing new elements without giving the audience something concrete to attach them to. You need that sort of grounding or payoff unless you're making this for an audience that is already familiar with your world, and I'm not sure that this is the case.
Beyond that, though, Johnson and co-director Joshua Demeulle just don't have the resources and practice to pull it off. Nobody has a strong and interesting personality, and the use of black-and-white to represent Limbo simply becomes drab without more color for contrast. The pacing is also a real problem; the presentation at the festival seemed like neither a single 42-minute TV episode built for commercial breaks nor a compilation of shorter webisodes. The focus shifted as if it were the latter, but there was no point, either at a long fade to black or the very end, where it felt like something was accomplished. You need those chapter breaks that feel like some progress has been made even as they make one curious about what will happen next, even if you have planned something much more serial out.
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
It may not always seem to be the case, but what an aspiring filmmaker can do today is pretty extraordinary, and not just in terms of there being more compact and affordable hardware available for shooting, editing, and creating visual effects than ever before. There are platforms for showing what you are capable of and developing a fanbase, getting in touch with potential collaborators, and even raising money. Here's the thing, though: Between that and the scaling-up that the big studios are doing, those aspiring filmmakers now want to do more. That's why something like Mythica: A Quest for Heroes has a colon in its title and occasionally looks a little stretched on-screen. Writer/director Anne K. Black has the tools at her disposal to make a decent fantasy movie, but wants to make more, and wants the one she's got to be even bigger.
That's not unreasonable. The world of Mythica is a fairly standard swords-and-sorcery world - a medieval level of technology with a select few able to perform magic, mostly populated by human beings but worth the occasional orc or dwarf showing up - but Black still had to establish the bounds on that magic, the rivalries that drive conflicts in that world, and a whole raft of other things that could swallow one movie whole if not parceled out a bit. If you're going to make bigger plans for the world, you might as well make bigger plans for your characters. The trick, which Black and her co-writers Jason Faller & Kynan Griffin generally manage to pull off, it's making the first installment satisfying enough to encourage viewers to come back because they like what they see, as opposed to just relying on the fantasy fan's compulsion to see any story out to the end.
That includes things which start or feeling like someone else's game of Dungeons & Dragons, which is the case here. The leaders of the assembled party are Marek (Melanie Stone), a club-footed slave who has a natural aptitude for magic, and Teela (Nicola Posener), a priestess who was the only one to escape when her temple was destroyed. When circumstances make Marek a fugitive and no other adventurer is willing to help Teela, they join forces, recruiting swordsman Thane (Adam Johnson) and thief Dagen (Jake Stormoen) to help rescue Teela's sister from the mercenaries and monsters that have taken her.
Full review at EFC.
Blessid
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
Sometimes it's hard to give a movie a fair shake, no matter how much it may deserve one. I saw a flat-out great movie with a similar idea just a couple weeks before seeing Blessid, so I wanted it to do more with its premise as soon as it showed its hand. It never managed that, and while I think that its relatively small ambitions do hurt it, knowing just what else could be done shouldn't diminish what it does have going for it.
That would be the performances of the leads. Neither Rachel Kerbs nor Rick Montgomery Jr. is charged with giving a showy, theatrical performance, but each is able to get across a great deal of what makes his or her character tick in gestures and body language. Get the pair in a room together, and they do a nice job of revealing themselves even if they are trying to ferret information out about one another. The older Montgomery is clearly more experienced than Kerbs, and also given material where his Jedediah Cross gets to come across as more than he appears to be, but she more than holds her own, even when not paired with castmates not so skilled as Montgomery.
That's the case for a while at the start, when pregnant, depressed, and even suicidal Sarah Duncliffe (Kerbs) is prescribed bed rest for her physical and mental health. Her husband Edward (Gene Silvers) is the sort of man who thinks he's doing her a favor that merits more gratitude by being married to her, and the ex-boyfriend she was having an affair with right around the time that the baby was conceived (Chris Devecchio) is hanging around a lot when Edward is not around. Cross has just moved into a long-empty house across the street, and initially just wants to be left alone, but the retiree is the only person Sarah has to talk to, and the only one watching when Sarah's symptoms expand to include sleepwalking.
Full review at EFC.
Shadows on the Wall
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
There's a vibe to Shadows on the Wall that suggests filmmaker Benjamin Carland is trying to make a Primer, not just something with big ideas but a small cast and budget, but a tactile feel. Something where all the exposed workings and dense terminology gives the movie credibility, and a feeling of being slightly overwhelmed is something to be pushed through rather than discouraged by. There are moments when he's pointed in the right direction and the audience feels the intended thrill, and if they outnumbered the ones that just didn't make sense, he would have made a fairly impressive bit of low-budget sci-fi.
He starts out with two roommates at a smallish college: Palmer Marshall (Chris Kauffmann) is a socially stunted introvert who books nonfunctional assemblies out of spare parts, and his cousin Chase (Tim Fox), there to have fun more than learn. Despite Palmer's apparent ability with electronics, he needs help to pass his freshman math classes, which is why his parents hire Alice (Nicole Lee Durant), who eventually joins him on working on his latest device, which Chase helps bankroll. And while it doesn't do what Palmer intended, what it does do is extraordinary on its own.
When Carland gets to that point, when the extraordinary starts to happen, it's hard to deny that the movie works. The undergraduate genius making a breakthrough isn't as popular a trope as it once was - the process of science has become less mysterious and the tools more specialized - but it's still a story that strikes a chord because everyone would love to discover something that is less hidden than in a place nobody has looked before. Carland handles the moments of discovery well, speeding things up as the characters learn more, always keeping the next thing tantalizingly close and making sure that, as big as it is, it's something the audience can grasp.
Full review at EFC.
Wild Tales
Today in funny coincidences: I've got a co-worker who spent part of her youth in the small town where I grew up, and while that is not completely unlikely - North Yarmouth, Maine is a small town (my graduating class was about 100 students, but kids from Cumberland, Chebeague Island, Pownal, and Durham probably made up 2/3 of that), but plenty will be drawn to Boston. It's just that she got here by way of Argentina, and actually knows a couple of people in the cast.
Read no significance into this. After all, when you see 300 movies a year, the math makes a case of knowing someone who knows someone almost inevitable. Still, it's neat.
Also neat: Wild Tales is the rare movie to be built as a deliberate collection of short stories by a single author. I'm not sure how often it happens in other media, aside from being so entrenched in popular music that doing things another way is a massive departure. I'm having a hard time thinking of any movies built this way aside from Heavy Metal and Creepshow (other anthologies put different directors together, while things like Pulp Fiction generally have overlapping stories and characters). It seems like something you could do in comics, although the question of how you define authorship pops up there - does Alan Moore working with a different artist on each feature in America's Best Comics count, presuming that the original intent was not to have them cross over (which is almost certainly not the case)? I recall a more recent project along those lines, done as a flipbook, although the specifics else me. It seems like it might be done more often in print, although you'd have to establish some ground rules about entries being published as separate short stories.
I'm guessing it's rare, which is a shame, because I have to imagine that a lot of filmmakers might have a lot of fun putting together a movie the same way that you'd make a record album. It's easy to see the logistics of why not, but that just makes Wild Tales an even bigger treat.
Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)
There aren't a whole lot of movies like Wild Tales that get made - most anthologies are built around multiple filmmakers taking on a topic, and when it is the work of a single voice, there is usually something going on to tie them together into a single unit. It makes sense; people are more likely to judge the whole by the portion that disappointed them unless there is a reason to consider the good ones separately. Unless, that is, it's a movie where every segment is as universally excellent as what Damián Szifrón comes up with here.
The stories themselves are presented separately: A man and a woman meet on a plane, only to find out about a common element in their past. Another meeting occurs in a restaurant, with a waitress recognizing the man who destroyed her family. A driver insults the man he passes, only to have a flat tire a few kilometers later. Anger at a parking ticket upends a man's life. A hit-and-run driver's wealthy father hatches a scheme to keep his son out of jail. And, finally, a woman discovers her partner's infidelity at their wedding reception. No framing device, no common characters, and if any background element recurs, you will likely have to be looking for minutia to see it.
There's almost a theme of revenge running through the entire package, but Szifrón leaves that out of one story, keeping this from being "the revenge movie". Oh, it's there, and almost necessary - with each story getting roughly twenty minutes, it makes sense to start with something already in place that, if it doesn't kick things into action right away, doesn't have to smolder for very long or hide. Szifrón lays his cards on the table fairly quickly in every segment, and even once he's had the movie take a turn, he's more likely let things keep going in that direction with more detail rather than switch things up. It's a canny move; with five big shifts already built into the feature, anything more might just make things feel too random for the audience, or leave them trying to figure out what was happening in one story while the film has moved on to something else.
Full review on EFC
Read no significance into this. After all, when you see 300 movies a year, the math makes a case of knowing someone who knows someone almost inevitable. Still, it's neat.
Also neat: Wild Tales is the rare movie to be built as a deliberate collection of short stories by a single author. I'm not sure how often it happens in other media, aside from being so entrenched in popular music that doing things another way is a massive departure. I'm having a hard time thinking of any movies built this way aside from Heavy Metal and Creepshow (other anthologies put different directors together, while things like Pulp Fiction generally have overlapping stories and characters). It seems like something you could do in comics, although the question of how you define authorship pops up there - does Alan Moore working with a different artist on each feature in America's Best Comics count, presuming that the original intent was not to have them cross over (which is almost certainly not the case)? I recall a more recent project along those lines, done as a flipbook, although the specifics else me. It seems like it might be done more often in print, although you'd have to establish some ground rules about entries being published as separate short stories.
I'm guessing it's rare, which is a shame, because I have to imagine that a lot of filmmakers might have a lot of fun putting together a movie the same way that you'd make a record album. It's easy to see the logistics of why not, but that just makes Wild Tales an even bigger treat.
Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 7 March 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)
There aren't a whole lot of movies like Wild Tales that get made - most anthologies are built around multiple filmmakers taking on a topic, and when it is the work of a single voice, there is usually something going on to tie them together into a single unit. It makes sense; people are more likely to judge the whole by the portion that disappointed them unless there is a reason to consider the good ones separately. Unless, that is, it's a movie where every segment is as universally excellent as what Damián Szifrón comes up with here.
The stories themselves are presented separately: A man and a woman meet on a plane, only to find out about a common element in their past. Another meeting occurs in a restaurant, with a waitress recognizing the man who destroyed her family. A driver insults the man he passes, only to have a flat tire a few kilometers later. Anger at a parking ticket upends a man's life. A hit-and-run driver's wealthy father hatches a scheme to keep his son out of jail. And, finally, a woman discovers her partner's infidelity at their wedding reception. No framing device, no common characters, and if any background element recurs, you will likely have to be looking for minutia to see it.
There's almost a theme of revenge running through the entire package, but Szifrón leaves that out of one story, keeping this from being "the revenge movie". Oh, it's there, and almost necessary - with each story getting roughly twenty minutes, it makes sense to start with something already in place that, if it doesn't kick things into action right away, doesn't have to smolder for very long or hide. Szifrón lays his cards on the table fairly quickly in every segment, and even once he's had the movie take a turn, he's more likely let things keep going in that direction with more detail rather than switch things up. It's a canny move; with five big shifts already built into the feature, anything more might just make things feel too random for the audience, or leave them trying to figure out what was happening in one story while the film has moved on to something else.
Full review on EFC
Sunday, March 08, 2015
12 Golden Ducks
Tonight's first lesson in moviegoing: Take the bird in the hand where public transportation is concerned. If I had just stayed on the subway instead of trying to take a shortcut with the 47 bus, only to have it not show, I probably could have taken the D straight to the theater rather than get off the B at Kenmore and just barely get into the movie.
The second: Going in blind is great, going in so blind that you don't know the basic gag of the thing - that Sandra Ng is underneath one heck of a makeup job to play a frequently-shirtless male character - probably doesn't help much either. I must sheepishly admit that I only knew this was the case after going home, searching for cast lists, finding none that were English-friendly, and then finally looking up other reviews to match names to characters and then reading that Sandra Ng played Future Cheung. This after seeing previews before the last few Chinese movies to play the area, too - now I want to know if I was missing obvious cues in the trailers as well.
I do find it kind of amazing that I've barely seen anything with Ms. Ng in any sort of prominent role before - looking over her IMDB entry, it's pretty much just Echoes of the Rainbow (and I'd forgotten about that) back until and then a big gap back to Inspectors Wear Skirts, where she was much younger and playing a bit part (one of several cadets being trained by Cynthia Rothrock). It's a reminder that I need to try and hit the New York Asian Film Festival again after not being able to squeeze it in before Fantasia the last few years; she was a guest with a mini-retrospective at last year's festival. I miss good stuff by not going there, even for a weekend.
12 Golden Ducks
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2015 in Regal Fenway #9 (first-run, DCP)
I see a fair number of movies from Hong Kong - just about every one that plays local theaters or the festivals I attend - but I've still somehow managed to miss almost the entire career of Sandra Ng Kwan-yue. This means that I spent a lot of the movie wondering just who the heck she, the only person named in the opening titles, was playing in a movie about male escorts. When it turned out to be the main character, I had to admit I was impressed. I don't know how much funnier that makes the movie, but it certainly makes it more odd.
Ng plays Future Cheung, a "duck" (Cantonese slang for gigolo) who learned how to live off women from a very young age, but after being conned himself, he's let himself go to become an afterthought at a bar in Thailand. His old teacher Mr. Lo (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) finds him and brings him back to Hong Kong, where a couple of old friends - gym trainer Rocky (Louis Koo Tin-lok) and hairdresser Kenji (Eason Chan Yik-shun) - help him get presentable again. Future still has to work his way back up, and a former gigolo now selling supplements to his older clients by the name of King (Simon Yam) gets him a new spot, where he soon befriends former stockbroker Chan (Wilfred Lau), hard-hat type Dick Wide (Philip Keung Hiu-man), and eccentric "alien" Nebula (Babyjohn Choi); they also befriend King's oldest client (Lisa Lu Yan).
I don't know if I actually counted twelve ducks with parts of any import in this movie, even if you expanded the definition somewhat liberally, but that sort of precision doesn't actually matter, because this movie is less a story than a set of gags. There's a vague sort of plot about Future trying to work his way back up to the top, but it's a wispy thing, just barely there enough to suggest an order for the various jokes. Li makes the point that men provide services for women more than the opposite these days, even if you ignore prostitution - maids and waitresses looking for husbands have given way to personal trainers and hairdressers trying to get by - but I suspect that any other satire is fairly Hong Kong-specific.
Full review on EFC
The second: Going in blind is great, going in so blind that you don't know the basic gag of the thing - that Sandra Ng is underneath one heck of a makeup job to play a frequently-shirtless male character - probably doesn't help much either. I must sheepishly admit that I only knew this was the case after going home, searching for cast lists, finding none that were English-friendly, and then finally looking up other reviews to match names to characters and then reading that Sandra Ng played Future Cheung. This after seeing previews before the last few Chinese movies to play the area, too - now I want to know if I was missing obvious cues in the trailers as well.
I do find it kind of amazing that I've barely seen anything with Ms. Ng in any sort of prominent role before - looking over her IMDB entry, it's pretty much just Echoes of the Rainbow (and I'd forgotten about that) back until and then a big gap back to Inspectors Wear Skirts, where she was much younger and playing a bit part (one of several cadets being trained by Cynthia Rothrock). It's a reminder that I need to try and hit the New York Asian Film Festival again after not being able to squeeze it in before Fantasia the last few years; she was a guest with a mini-retrospective at last year's festival. I miss good stuff by not going there, even for a weekend.
12 Golden Ducks
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2015 in Regal Fenway #9 (first-run, DCP)
I see a fair number of movies from Hong Kong - just about every one that plays local theaters or the festivals I attend - but I've still somehow managed to miss almost the entire career of Sandra Ng Kwan-yue. This means that I spent a lot of the movie wondering just who the heck she, the only person named in the opening titles, was playing in a movie about male escorts. When it turned out to be the main character, I had to admit I was impressed. I don't know how much funnier that makes the movie, but it certainly makes it more odd.
Ng plays Future Cheung, a "duck" (Cantonese slang for gigolo) who learned how to live off women from a very young age, but after being conned himself, he's let himself go to become an afterthought at a bar in Thailand. His old teacher Mr. Lo (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) finds him and brings him back to Hong Kong, where a couple of old friends - gym trainer Rocky (Louis Koo Tin-lok) and hairdresser Kenji (Eason Chan Yik-shun) - help him get presentable again. Future still has to work his way back up, and a former gigolo now selling supplements to his older clients by the name of King (Simon Yam) gets him a new spot, where he soon befriends former stockbroker Chan (Wilfred Lau), hard-hat type Dick Wide (Philip Keung Hiu-man), and eccentric "alien" Nebula (Babyjohn Choi); they also befriend King's oldest client (Lisa Lu Yan).
I don't know if I actually counted twelve ducks with parts of any import in this movie, even if you expanded the definition somewhat liberally, but that sort of precision doesn't actually matter, because this movie is less a story than a set of gags. There's a vague sort of plot about Future trying to work his way back up to the top, but it's a wispy thing, just barely there enough to suggest an order for the various jokes. Li makes the point that men provide services for women more than the opposite these days, even if you ignore prostitution - maids and waitresses looking for husbands have given way to personal trainers and hairdressers trying to get by - but I suspect that any other satire is fairly Hong Kong-specific.
Full review on EFC
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Chappie
Man, to think that I haven't been bothering with the Thursday night first shows in order to avoid crowds, but this is the second week in a row where they've been fairly thin. I wonder if doing this for every movie rather than just the highly anticipated ones has diminished the excitement. On the other hand, the two I've gone to see early were A la Mala and Chappie.
It thinned out by the end, but less because people didn't like it than because of this:
Right during the climax! The lights come up, the movie stops, and we're herded into the lobby, where it does, to be fair, smell like something has burnt. It's cold out there, though, and if you're not loving the move, or already figure that it's near the end, I can see an argument for heading home rather than waiting around for who knows how long. It turned out to be no more than fifteen minutes, but it was fifteen minutes after that to get us back in our seats and the movie started up again. Heck of a momentum-killer.
When re-seating us, they said they'd take care of us on the way out, but I, at least, wasn't handed any sort of free pass, maybe because I stuck around to watch the credits, as I do, and thus wasn't with the crowd leaving. No big deal, as I used MoviePass (heading to Assembly Row because the app wasn't showing Fenway; apparently they couldn't distinguish the regular and RPX screenings happening at the same time). Funny night for them to send me an email survey about my experience, though.
I've got a few thoughts about the end, which are at the bottom after the review.
Chappie
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #11 (first-run, DCP)
When descriptions of "Chappie" (both the film and the character) started coming out a couple years ago, it sounded like Neill Blomkamp was making a high-concept comedy, making the earnest and heroic tone of the previews confusing and potentially disappointing. There are enough uninspired moments to cause concern, but there's enough anarchic madness to it to make up for that and then some.
It pairs a future where the Johannesburg police department is greatly augmented by autonomous robotic "scouts", although their creator Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) has, in his off-hours, moved on to building what he believes is a true artificial intelligence. When his boss at Tetravaal, Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), refuses to allow him to use company resources to test it, he swipes a scout scheduled for demolition to use as a test bed, only to be kidnapped himself by some not-so-bright punks (Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo) who think he's got a remote control that can turn the cops off while they perform a heist that will clear all their debts. That's the environment in which Wilson's AI awakens; it's soon calling itself "Chappie" (voice of Sharlto Copley) and rapidly incorporating a very different set of influences than its maker intended.
There's also a rival designer at Tetravaal played by Hugh Jackman, and he tends to feel like something jammed in because the studio wanted a more digestible plot and to introduce one element needed later on. His project - the bulky, human-operated "Moose" - seems like a step back from the scouts, and also makes the plot hinge on the idea that urban police departments would see it (or anything) as overkill. Blomkamp could not have foreseen the Ferguson situation, exactly, when making his movie a year ago in South Africa, but the here are moments when the movie veers close enough to the topic of the militarization of police forces that sharper satire seems required.
Full review on EFC
SPOILERS!
I am not sure what I think of the end at all. I was absolutely expecting the moment when Chappie figured out how to transfer consciousness to go the more expected route where he discovers that the actual soul couldn't be grasped, but instead he did something crazy-advanced that certainly lives up to Deon's idea that AI could surpass humans, and appears to manage it. I can't say I buy into this much at all, and the fact that he wound up restoring Yolandi from a backup implies that he hasn't really done this at all - that Deon 2.0 and Yolandi 2.0 are mere simulations, despite the fact that Deon slumped like his life force had been removed during the transfer.
On the other hand, even if I find the cavalier nature with which Blomkamp handled it truly frustrating - this is the basis for an entire second movie given very short shrift in the last ten minutes, and it's hard to smile at "CONSCIOUSNESS.DAT" as a filename after the movie goes here - I kind of like what it represents. Humanity creating its potential successors would be incredibly disruptive, more so than just robots going out of control, and there's no doubt that this is the case when the movie ends. It is a big deal that will change the world profoundly.
It does, as I mention in the review, feel a lot like District 9, with Chappie & Deon 2.0 retreating into the wild parts of Johannesburg much like a transforming Wikus did in that movie, and as much as the scenes feeling so similar grates a bit, I am kind of fascinated by how it is revealing Blomkamp's science-fictional interests: Wikus becomes an alien in District 9, Max becomes a cyborg in Elysium, Deon and Yolandi are resurrected as robots here. Blomkamp seems to be saying that humanity's future isn't necessarily as humanity, that we'll need to become other things and accept becoming them in order to survive. I haven't examined his Alien 5 concept work much, but what I've seen certainly seems to imply that he'll be carrying some of the ideas Whedon, Jeunet, and Caro were working with in Alien Resurrection, if not the actual story.
!SRELIOPS
It's interesting that Blomkamp will be doing an Alien sequel next, both because it would seem to continue the franchise's tendency to choose people who will make their own movie without trying to match what came before too closely (although he has been saying he'd hew closer to the first two than the next two) and because I think Chappie will not be the same sort of hit District 9 was and he would probably have to do some work-for-hire in order to regain the industry's trust if that's the case. He wound up being proactive about it, and now genre fans are going to talk about him doing that rather than two disappointments in the wake of a much-liked debut.
Also, this comes roughly a month after the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending, which was also enjoyably weird for me but which didn't capture the imagination of a mainstream audience. I hope this isn't a last gasp of studios being willing to risk money on big sci-fi projects by ambitious filmmakers. As much as I'm down for a Blomkamp Alien and whatever the Wachowskis wind up doing next if a studio project is necessary (them doing Inhumans would be a classic Marvel buy-low move), I find that as much as I enjoy good people adding to franchises I like, these movies where the filmmakers are going for something big, nuts, and new are more exciting, even when they become a mess.
It thinned out by the end, but less because people didn't like it than because of this:
Right during the climax! The lights come up, the movie stops, and we're herded into the lobby, where it does, to be fair, smell like something has burnt. It's cold out there, though, and if you're not loving the move, or already figure that it's near the end, I can see an argument for heading home rather than waiting around for who knows how long. It turned out to be no more than fifteen minutes, but it was fifteen minutes after that to get us back in our seats and the movie started up again. Heck of a momentum-killer.
When re-seating us, they said they'd take care of us on the way out, but I, at least, wasn't handed any sort of free pass, maybe because I stuck around to watch the credits, as I do, and thus wasn't with the crowd leaving. No big deal, as I used MoviePass (heading to Assembly Row because the app wasn't showing Fenway; apparently they couldn't distinguish the regular and RPX screenings happening at the same time). Funny night for them to send me an email survey about my experience, though.
I've got a few thoughts about the end, which are at the bottom after the review.
Chappie
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #11 (first-run, DCP)
When descriptions of "Chappie" (both the film and the character) started coming out a couple years ago, it sounded like Neill Blomkamp was making a high-concept comedy, making the earnest and heroic tone of the previews confusing and potentially disappointing. There are enough uninspired moments to cause concern, but there's enough anarchic madness to it to make up for that and then some.
It pairs a future where the Johannesburg police department is greatly augmented by autonomous robotic "scouts", although their creator Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) has, in his off-hours, moved on to building what he believes is a true artificial intelligence. When his boss at Tetravaal, Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), refuses to allow him to use company resources to test it, he swipes a scout scheduled for demolition to use as a test bed, only to be kidnapped himself by some not-so-bright punks (Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo) who think he's got a remote control that can turn the cops off while they perform a heist that will clear all their debts. That's the environment in which Wilson's AI awakens; it's soon calling itself "Chappie" (voice of Sharlto Copley) and rapidly incorporating a very different set of influences than its maker intended.
There's also a rival designer at Tetravaal played by Hugh Jackman, and he tends to feel like something jammed in because the studio wanted a more digestible plot and to introduce one element needed later on. His project - the bulky, human-operated "Moose" - seems like a step back from the scouts, and also makes the plot hinge on the idea that urban police departments would see it (or anything) as overkill. Blomkamp could not have foreseen the Ferguson situation, exactly, when making his movie a year ago in South Africa, but the here are moments when the movie veers close enough to the topic of the militarization of police forces that sharper satire seems required.
Full review on EFC
SPOILERS!
I am not sure what I think of the end at all. I was absolutely expecting the moment when Chappie figured out how to transfer consciousness to go the more expected route where he discovers that the actual soul couldn't be grasped, but instead he did something crazy-advanced that certainly lives up to Deon's idea that AI could surpass humans, and appears to manage it. I can't say I buy into this much at all, and the fact that he wound up restoring Yolandi from a backup implies that he hasn't really done this at all - that Deon 2.0 and Yolandi 2.0 are mere simulations, despite the fact that Deon slumped like his life force had been removed during the transfer.
On the other hand, even if I find the cavalier nature with which Blomkamp handled it truly frustrating - this is the basis for an entire second movie given very short shrift in the last ten minutes, and it's hard to smile at "CONSCIOUSNESS.DAT" as a filename after the movie goes here - I kind of like what it represents. Humanity creating its potential successors would be incredibly disruptive, more so than just robots going out of control, and there's no doubt that this is the case when the movie ends. It is a big deal that will change the world profoundly.
It does, as I mention in the review, feel a lot like District 9, with Chappie & Deon 2.0 retreating into the wild parts of Johannesburg much like a transforming Wikus did in that movie, and as much as the scenes feeling so similar grates a bit, I am kind of fascinated by how it is revealing Blomkamp's science-fictional interests: Wikus becomes an alien in District 9, Max becomes a cyborg in Elysium, Deon and Yolandi are resurrected as robots here. Blomkamp seems to be saying that humanity's future isn't necessarily as humanity, that we'll need to become other things and accept becoming them in order to survive. I haven't examined his Alien 5 concept work much, but what I've seen certainly seems to imply that he'll be carrying some of the ideas Whedon, Jeunet, and Caro were working with in Alien Resurrection, if not the actual story.
!SRELIOPS
It's interesting that Blomkamp will be doing an Alien sequel next, both because it would seem to continue the franchise's tendency to choose people who will make their own movie without trying to match what came before too closely (although he has been saying he'd hew closer to the first two than the next two) and because I think Chappie will not be the same sort of hit District 9 was and he would probably have to do some work-for-hire in order to regain the industry's trust if that's the case. He wound up being proactive about it, and now genre fans are going to talk about him doing that rather than two disappointments in the wake of a much-liked debut.
Also, this comes roughly a month after the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending, which was also enjoyably weird for me but which didn't capture the imagination of a mainstream audience. I hope this isn't a last gasp of studios being willing to risk money on big sci-fi projects by ambitious filmmakers. As much as I'm down for a Blomkamp Alien and whatever the Wachowskis wind up doing next if a studio project is necessary (them doing Inhumans would be a classic Marvel buy-low move), I find that as much as I enjoy good people adding to franchises I like, these movies where the filmmakers are going for something big, nuts, and new are more exciting, even when they become a mess.
Thursday, March 05, 2015
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 March 2015 - 12 March 2015
This is a good weekend to go to the movies if you like Dev Patel. Good for him! Must have been a busy and confusing week of doing interviews and other publicity, though.
My plans: Chappie, 12 Golden Ducks, Son of the Sheik, the Fields silents, Wild Tales, Focus, and maybe Hard to Be a God and Buzzard. The Search for General Tso is recommended.
- The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is opening at practically every screen in the area - The Coolidge, the Somerville, Kendall Square, West Newton, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere. In that one, he once again plays the manager of a retirement hotel in India, with eyes toward opening a second. Once again, the residents are a whole bunch of great British actors who have passed a certain age, this time joined by a couple of Americans in Richard Gere and David Strathairn (who, apparently, is actually about the same age as Bill Nighy, which means Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are cradle-robbing).
The midnight shows for March are actually going to be fairly new-release heavy, with the first entry on Friday & Saturday night- Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's "Island of Dr. Moreau" - a documentary of how Stanley was fired from the Val Kilmer/Marlon Brando movie on the first day of shooting, which gives one an idea of what sort of troubled production it was. In other special presentations, hopefully the entries for Tuesday's Open Screen are not that sort of disaster. The Francophone film series also continues on Thursday with another documentary, Un rêve américain, in which French Candian musician Bruno Boulianne travels across the U.S. meeting others of similar heritage. - Getting back to Dev Patel, he's one of the stars of Neill Blomkap's latest, Chappie, playing an engineer who upgrades a police "scout" robot to have genuine emergent intelligence, raising the paranoia of folks who have seen how well intelligent robots with guns have gone in every other movie. Not sure what to make of it; the trailers, synopsis, and early descriptions of the story are all really different tones. It's at the Capitol, Jordan's Furniture,Apple Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.
No Dev Patel in Unfinished Business, which features Vince Vaughn as a small businessman competing with his previous employers for a contract on a business trip to Germany. Nice cast, including Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, and Sienna Miller, and I liked director Ken Scott's Starbuck (though I didn't see the remake he did with Vaughn). It's at the Capitol, Apple Fresh Pond, Fenway, Boston Common, Assembly Row, and Revere.
Fenway also has this week's Chinese opening, 12 Golden Ducks, which I guess is in the vein of the Golden Chickens series that also stars Sandra Ng, only featuring male escort played by Louis Koo. Tons of Hong Kong stars in this one - Nicholas Tse,Simon Yam, Michelle Chen, Dada Chan, Eason Chan, Anthony Wong, Zhao Wei, Isabella Yeong. Over at Boston Common, Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal drops down to two 3D shows per day. - In addition to Marigold Hotel 2, Kendall Square and West Newton will be opening another one of the Oscar nominees in the Foreign Language Film category. Wild Tales is from Argentina, and features six overlapping stories of life spinning far out of control. The Kendall also has a one-week booking of Queen and Country, John Boorman's sequel to his 1987 film Hope and Glory, in which the nine-year-old boy living in England during World War II is now 19 and has just been drafted. Why the earlier movie is not streaming somewhere, I cannot guess.
- The Brattle has the very entertaining The Search for General Tso from Friday to Sunday, with director Ian Cheney on hand for the 7pm show opening night. In it, Cheney sets out to learn about the namesake of General Tso's chicken and winds up creating a movie about how Chinese immigrants became Chinese-Americans, assimilating and also dealing with prejudice. No 9:30 shows, though; that slot is given toBuzzard, in which a smll-time con artist winds up on the streets of Detroit, growing every more paranoid. There are also 12:30pm screenings of The Last: Naruto the Movie, but those are already sold out (good job, anime/manga fans)!
There's also a documentary director in town on Monday, as Mary Lampson introduces and answers questions after a DocYard screening of Underground, a 1975 film following key members of The Weathermen - close enough access that the FBI would attempt to confiscate the footage as evidence. Tuesday is a local premier of Destiny's Detour, the latest collaboration between Tom Snyder, Jonathan Katz, and Tom Leopold. Then Wednesday and Thursday are a two-day run of Hard to Be a God, the last project of Russian filmmaker Aleksey German (finished by his family after his death), based upon a novel by the authors of Stalker and featuring an Earth scientist trying not to interfere in the cultural development of a planet still in the middle ages. - It's a good weekend for those of us who like silents at the Somerville Theatre: The Alloy Orchestra makes their annual visit on Saturday evening with their new score and restoration of Rudolph Valentino's Son of the Sheik. Then, for those of us who aren't sated, Jeff Rapsis will be accompanying Sunday's 35mm double feature of two W.C. Fields silents: Sally of the Sawdust and Running Wild. Should be interesting to see how a guy known primarily for his delivery handled this sort of movie.
- The Harvard Film Archive will welcome documentary filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki on Friday and Saturday to show and discuss two of his recent films about the changing People's Republic of China: The Iron Ministry (Friday) is shot on the trains which connect the vast country, while Yumen (Saturday) visits a quickly-built oil town that was abandoned just as quickly when the oil ran out.
Sunday and Monday are movies that were cancelled because of last month's snow: silent WWI film The Big Parade (with music by Robert Humphreville) on Sunday and the restored "A Night of Storytelling" (35mm) and Man of Aran (16mm) on Monday. The Wednesday night "Furious Cinema" presentation is a 35mm print of John Cassavetes's Minne and Moskowitz. - The Museum of Fine Artscontinues their New Latin American Cinema program with Chile's Voice Over (Friday), Argentina's Natural Sciences (Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday), Brazil's Casa Grande, or The Ballad of Poor Jean (Saturday & Sunday) and Obra (Wednesday), also from Brazil. There' also a Tuesday afternoon series of some sort starting (?) with Rebel Without a Cause.
- No subtitled Indian movies at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/iMovieCafe this week, but there's Enakkul Oruvan if you speak Tamil and Surya Vs Surya if you know Telugu.
My plans: Chappie, 12 Golden Ducks, Son of the Sheik, the Fields silents, Wild Tales, Focus, and maybe Hard to Be a God and Buzzard. The Search for General Tso is recommended.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
The Lazarus Effect
(Looks at options for Amazon link, sees that this is also the name of a Frank Herbert novel, shakes head)
The fact that eFilmCritic doesn't give out assignments means that nobody really has to review a given new release, but I do feel a weird urge to fill in holes. Still, when I saw that Peter had reviewed it for RogerEbert.com and Brett does his horror reviews on his own oh-the-horror.com site, which left it to me. I could have said no, but MoviePass meant it was effectively free, Mark Duplass had done an amusing Q&A a few days before (and also worked with producer Jason Blum on the terrific Creep), Olivia Wilde did a funny annotation of an Esquire profile, and, hey, there's other good folks in the cast. Like Sarah Bolger, who will always be "one of the kids from In America" to me, no matter what else she does or how attractive an adult she's grown into.
It's not good. At all. It's so forgettable that it sucks other bits of memory in - I think I read that it was directed by the guy who made Jiro Dreams of Sushi something like four times before the idea actually stuck in my head despite that being a pretty interesting and unusual diversion. The other folks in the theater were actually doing some critical dissection, wondering what the heck happened to the dog who just vanished midway through despite being pretty damn important.
I kind of hope that's the direct-to-video sequel they go for. There are two other obvious routes, but there is a part of me that would be tickled pink if this movie spawned a series of movies about an immortal dog who has seen hell and travels the countryside like a demonic Littlest Hobo, drawn to paranormal activity and dealing with it by being as good a dog as he can be with the strange voices in his head.
As an aside: Can anybody actually name a series that ran like what I describe in the first paragraph of the review (direct-to-video/VOD sequels that wound up with a strangely consistent creative team and a dedicated fanbase)? I feel like it's happened before, but the only things that leap to mind are a couple of Japanese series. I can think of a couple of times it has happened on television - that's how we wound up with more Stargate and Highlander than bears thinking of - but examples of the route I'd like The Lazarus Effect to go elude me.
Weird crowd, too. When I sat down just as previews started to run, there was only one other person in the theater, and while I opted for center-right-behind-the-railing (the first elevated seats above the wheelchair row), he was in almost the last row and so far to the side that he was actually behind the walkway in. I cannot fathom being the first person to arrive in a theater and choosing that seat. Similarly, a lot of folks who arrived during the trailers sat far enough back that they made shadows on the screen when they got up, which was relatively often. What the heck? Why go to a theater if you're going to sit far back enough to make the screen the apparent size of your TV, and why so restless? It was an 83-minute movie, for crying out loud; even with AMC's 20-minute trailer package, that's not a terribly long time to go without checking your phone or peeing (and if you know you can't last that long for the latter, find a seat where you're not interrupting someone else's movie, even if it's something crappy like this).
Ah, well. At least the stuff around this amused me more than the typical terrible horror movie.
The Lazarus Effect
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2015 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)
There's a thing that sometimes happens where a movie under-performs but the name apparently has just enough value that whoever winds up with the rights makes a direct-to-video sequel, or two, or more, with tiny budgets that maybe allow one person from low in the original's cast to return and probably doesn't bring the original writers and directors back. But, perhaps, they do get the same guy to a few of them, he or she goes off in a new direction, and they develop a small but hard-core fanbase that tells you the sequels are really great and just ignore the first one. The Lazarus Effect has great potential along those lines, and it's a shame about the movie itself.
It actually starts well enough; we're introduced to Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde), a pair of engaged scientists working on a process that would allow for patients who have flatlined to be revived much later than was previously the case. Working with them are Niko (Donald Glover), a longtime friend with an obvious crush on Zoe, and Clay (Evan Peters), an obnoxious-but-allegedly-brilliant younger colleague. Eva (Sarah Bolger), a student at the university hosting the researchers, is documenting the process. Today, they've just had an animal test succeed, but the revived dog is acting strange - and they are almost immediately shut down and locked out of their lab. But if they can reproduce their work...
That may not sound particularly promising, but a good cast can make the movie go down fairly easy during the set-up part. Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde make for unconventional choices for their character types - Duplass plays his driven genius as more casual and amiable than is often the case, and Wilde brings an approachable sort of confidence to the character whose job is to undermine the certainty a bit. They work well as a pair, smart, funny, and mostly at ease, enough to give a little push to later events. Donald Glover does a fair job as the guy one the outskirts of that relationship, Evan Peters adds a bit of manic energy, and Sarah Bolger gives Ava a little more personality than just being the pretty girl that the rest explains things to. Ray Wise shows up as an oily corporate type and makes you hope that Ray Wise is in more than one scene.
Full review on EFC
The fact that eFilmCritic doesn't give out assignments means that nobody really has to review a given new release, but I do feel a weird urge to fill in holes. Still, when I saw that Peter had reviewed it for RogerEbert.com and Brett does his horror reviews on his own oh-the-horror.com site, which left it to me. I could have said no, but MoviePass meant it was effectively free, Mark Duplass had done an amusing Q&A a few days before (and also worked with producer Jason Blum on the terrific Creep), Olivia Wilde did a funny annotation of an Esquire profile, and, hey, there's other good folks in the cast. Like Sarah Bolger, who will always be "one of the kids from In America" to me, no matter what else she does or how attractive an adult she's grown into.
It's not good. At all. It's so forgettable that it sucks other bits of memory in - I think I read that it was directed by the guy who made Jiro Dreams of Sushi something like four times before the idea actually stuck in my head despite that being a pretty interesting and unusual diversion. The other folks in the theater were actually doing some critical dissection, wondering what the heck happened to the dog who just vanished midway through despite being pretty damn important.
I kind of hope that's the direct-to-video sequel they go for. There are two other obvious routes, but there is a part of me that would be tickled pink if this movie spawned a series of movies about an immortal dog who has seen hell and travels the countryside like a demonic Littlest Hobo, drawn to paranormal activity and dealing with it by being as good a dog as he can be with the strange voices in his head.
As an aside: Can anybody actually name a series that ran like what I describe in the first paragraph of the review (direct-to-video/VOD sequels that wound up with a strangely consistent creative team and a dedicated fanbase)? I feel like it's happened before, but the only things that leap to mind are a couple of Japanese series. I can think of a couple of times it has happened on television - that's how we wound up with more Stargate and Highlander than bears thinking of - but examples of the route I'd like The Lazarus Effect to go elude me.
Weird crowd, too. When I sat down just as previews started to run, there was only one other person in the theater, and while I opted for center-right-behind-the-railing (the first elevated seats above the wheelchair row), he was in almost the last row and so far to the side that he was actually behind the walkway in. I cannot fathom being the first person to arrive in a theater and choosing that seat. Similarly, a lot of folks who arrived during the trailers sat far enough back that they made shadows on the screen when they got up, which was relatively often. What the heck? Why go to a theater if you're going to sit far back enough to make the screen the apparent size of your TV, and why so restless? It was an 83-minute movie, for crying out loud; even with AMC's 20-minute trailer package, that's not a terribly long time to go without checking your phone or peeing (and if you know you can't last that long for the latter, find a seat where you're not interrupting someone else's movie, even if it's something crappy like this).
Ah, well. At least the stuff around this amused me more than the typical terrible horror movie.
The Lazarus Effect
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2015 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)
There's a thing that sometimes happens where a movie under-performs but the name apparently has just enough value that whoever winds up with the rights makes a direct-to-video sequel, or two, or more, with tiny budgets that maybe allow one person from low in the original's cast to return and probably doesn't bring the original writers and directors back. But, perhaps, they do get the same guy to a few of them, he or she goes off in a new direction, and they develop a small but hard-core fanbase that tells you the sequels are really great and just ignore the first one. The Lazarus Effect has great potential along those lines, and it's a shame about the movie itself.
It actually starts well enough; we're introduced to Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde), a pair of engaged scientists working on a process that would allow for patients who have flatlined to be revived much later than was previously the case. Working with them are Niko (Donald Glover), a longtime friend with an obvious crush on Zoe, and Clay (Evan Peters), an obnoxious-but-allegedly-brilliant younger colleague. Eva (Sarah Bolger), a student at the university hosting the researchers, is documenting the process. Today, they've just had an animal test succeed, but the revived dog is acting strange - and they are almost immediately shut down and locked out of their lab. But if they can reproduce their work...
That may not sound particularly promising, but a good cast can make the movie go down fairly easy during the set-up part. Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde make for unconventional choices for their character types - Duplass plays his driven genius as more casual and amiable than is often the case, and Wilde brings an approachable sort of confidence to the character whose job is to undermine the certainty a bit. They work well as a pair, smart, funny, and mostly at ease, enough to give a little push to later events. Donald Glover does a fair job as the guy one the outskirts of that relationship, Evan Peters adds a bit of manic energy, and Sarah Bolger gives Ava a little more personality than just being the pretty girl that the rest explains things to. Ray Wise shows up as an oily corporate type and makes you hope that Ray Wise is in more than one scene.
Full review on EFC
Monday, March 02, 2015
Song of the Sea
My original plan over the weekend was to see this back to back with Paddington on Saturday, which would have been a pretty darn good afternoon of window-shipping for potential things to get my nieces for their birthdays and/or Christmas. It didn't work out that way, though - the times on Saturday were just to right even if the theaters were just for stops apart on the Red Line - which made for two weirdly parallel double features: Paddington & Maps to the Stars on Saturday and Song of the Sea & What We Do in the Shadows on Sunday. Not necessarily the order is recommend, although the day is seldom set up to give you a cute-movie chaser after the mean-spirited one.
It's a pretty delightful little movie, at least. Maybe one for my oldest niece, although the fairies she likes are more the cute little winged ones as opposed to the wide range from Irish folklore. Most adults with an appreciation for mythology and folklore should enjoy it too; it's a cute movie, but not one that feels like it has had its edges worn off.
It was kind of fun to see this one at Kendall Square, in that you seldom see kids there and they tend to liven up a somewhat serious crowd. The flip side is that the theater has no idea what previews to run before the movie - or, more likely, not much on the preview server that is really appropriate. I, as a kid, might have enjoyed the Amazing Randi documentary, but that's really kind of it. It was no wonder that a boy behind me started grumbling for the movie to start just two or so in.
Later on, I wondered how he might have reacted to the White God trailer. Kids like dogs and scary stories, right?
Song of the Sea
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)
There have generally been one or two movies like Song of the Sea among the nominees every year since the Oscars started giving out an award for best animated feature, and they're the best argument for the award's existence. No, this smaller film from Ireland that relatively few voters had seen had little chance to win, but being nominated makes it easier for it to get noticed later. That's when people notice it and realize that it's terrific.
It starts on a small island, where lighthouse-keeper Conor (voice of Brendan Gleeson) and his wife Bronagh (voice of Lisa Hannigan) are expecting their second child, but as they put four-year-old Ben to bed, it is clear that something is not right. Jump ahead six years, and is clear that Ben (voice of David Rawle) resents his sister Saoirse, who has not yet learned to talk. A scare at Saoirse's birthday party has Conor send the children to live in Dublin with their grandmother, an action that both reveals a greater destiny for Saoirse and means she may need more help than Ben and their dog Cu can give to fulfill it.
Saoirse, it turns out, is a selkie, one of the many sorts of faeries to be found in Celtic myth (though human on land, they become seals when they enter the water with their special coats). Director Tomm More and screenwriter William Collins embrace their homeland's rich mythology, and not just by building the story around it. Ben lives and clings to the stories his mother told, making him a refreshing outlier in a genre where the hero must often start out as cynical and then embrace his heritage. It lets the filmmakers introduce new elements casually, without having to go through the effort of convincing Ben and the audience anew each time, and also means that when Ben is stymied by the things that would present challenges to a ten-year-old boy, it does not seem like small potatoes compared to witches and monsters.
Full review on EFC
It's a pretty delightful little movie, at least. Maybe one for my oldest niece, although the fairies she likes are more the cute little winged ones as opposed to the wide range from Irish folklore. Most adults with an appreciation for mythology and folklore should enjoy it too; it's a cute movie, but not one that feels like it has had its edges worn off.
It was kind of fun to see this one at Kendall Square, in that you seldom see kids there and they tend to liven up a somewhat serious crowd. The flip side is that the theater has no idea what previews to run before the movie - or, more likely, not much on the preview server that is really appropriate. I, as a kid, might have enjoyed the Amazing Randi documentary, but that's really kind of it. It was no wonder that a boy behind me started grumbling for the movie to start just two or so in.
Later on, I wondered how he might have reacted to the White God trailer. Kids like dogs and scary stories, right?
Song of the Sea
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)
There have generally been one or two movies like Song of the Sea among the nominees every year since the Oscars started giving out an award for best animated feature, and they're the best argument for the award's existence. No, this smaller film from Ireland that relatively few voters had seen had little chance to win, but being nominated makes it easier for it to get noticed later. That's when people notice it and realize that it's terrific.
It starts on a small island, where lighthouse-keeper Conor (voice of Brendan Gleeson) and his wife Bronagh (voice of Lisa Hannigan) are expecting their second child, but as they put four-year-old Ben to bed, it is clear that something is not right. Jump ahead six years, and is clear that Ben (voice of David Rawle) resents his sister Saoirse, who has not yet learned to talk. A scare at Saoirse's birthday party has Conor send the children to live in Dublin with their grandmother, an action that both reveals a greater destiny for Saoirse and means she may need more help than Ben and their dog Cu can give to fulfill it.
Saoirse, it turns out, is a selkie, one of the many sorts of faeries to be found in Celtic myth (though human on land, they become seals when they enter the water with their special coats). Director Tomm More and screenwriter William Collins embrace their homeland's rich mythology, and not just by building the story around it. Ben lives and clings to the stories his mother told, making him a refreshing outlier in a genre where the hero must often start out as cynical and then embrace his heritage. It lets the filmmakers introduce new elements casually, without having to go through the effort of convincing Ben and the audience anew each time, and also means that when Ben is stymied by the things that would present challenges to a ten-year-old boy, it does not seem like small potatoes compared to witches and monsters.
Full review on EFC
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Maps to the Stars
It was a cruel tease for the College Corner Theatre to run a "Cronenberg's Mad Science" series through February and end it with this. Sure, it seems like the odds of ever getting the same sort of crazy science fiction and body horror that is synonymous with David Cronenberg's name from him again are fairly low - we'll have to wait for his son Brandon's next film to see if he had truly picked up the torch - but this was just about as far in the other direction as you might fear: a sadly familiar portrait of Hollywood being shallow and full of madness.
It could be worse, I suppose; while I was pondering how underwhelmed I was feeling, I saw other folks lamenting on Twitter that they might never see another Cronenberg movie in theaters again. This may not be prime Cronenberg, but you'd think something with this director and this cast would be a cut above a simultaneous video-on-demand release, which means a bunch of theaters won't play it. Heck, I wonder what same-day releases do to Oscar eligibility.
Maps to the Stars
* * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2015 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Hollywood stories can be self-indulgent or snide, depending on what sort of axes the people making them have to grind, rarely managing to hit the sweet spot in the middle. What they seldom are, though, is extraneous, but that's what happens with Maps to the Stars - there's one track that's a nifty little story with some potential. Whenever it gets into stuff that's specifically about the movie business, on the other hand, one can't help but be reminded that David Cronenberg used to make things far more original than this.
The movie-star track involves Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a second-generation actress who has reached an age when staying relevant takes a lot of tenacity if you're even given a chance. She's currently focused on landing a role in a remake of one of her mother's movies, and that mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon) is appearing to her as something between a haunting and a hallucination. Havana has regular sessions with pop psychiatrist Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), whose own son Benjie (Evan Bird) is an actor, with mother Christina (Olivia Williams) handling his career. Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), meanwhile, is just off the bus from an institution in Florida, and while she soon lands a job as Havana's assistant, it's Stafford, Benjie, and Christina who are most concerned about the young woman with the burns on her skin.
As soon as Stafford finds out that Agatha is in town, there's a tremendous tension to the Weiss side of the film, and while what writer Bruce Wagner has concocted is maybe not enough to fill a feature-length film as it is, it probably could be with a little more effort - it's got the makings of a Greek tragedy, and while many of the people involved are unstable in one way or another, their motivations still tend to be human and understandable. It's a fractious enough web of relationships on its own that the bits that involve Benjie being a self-centered brat of a child actor just seem little more than the latest time over some rather well-tread ground.
Full review on EFC
It could be worse, I suppose; while I was pondering how underwhelmed I was feeling, I saw other folks lamenting on Twitter that they might never see another Cronenberg movie in theaters again. This may not be prime Cronenberg, but you'd think something with this director and this cast would be a cut above a simultaneous video-on-demand release, which means a bunch of theaters won't play it. Heck, I wonder what same-day releases do to Oscar eligibility.
Maps to the Stars
* * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2015 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)
Hollywood stories can be self-indulgent or snide, depending on what sort of axes the people making them have to grind, rarely managing to hit the sweet spot in the middle. What they seldom are, though, is extraneous, but that's what happens with Maps to the Stars - there's one track that's a nifty little story with some potential. Whenever it gets into stuff that's specifically about the movie business, on the other hand, one can't help but be reminded that David Cronenberg used to make things far more original than this.
The movie-star track involves Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a second-generation actress who has reached an age when staying relevant takes a lot of tenacity if you're even given a chance. She's currently focused on landing a role in a remake of one of her mother's movies, and that mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon) is appearing to her as something between a haunting and a hallucination. Havana has regular sessions with pop psychiatrist Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), whose own son Benjie (Evan Bird) is an actor, with mother Christina (Olivia Williams) handling his career. Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), meanwhile, is just off the bus from an institution in Florida, and while she soon lands a job as Havana's assistant, it's Stafford, Benjie, and Christina who are most concerned about the young woman with the burns on her skin.
As soon as Stafford finds out that Agatha is in town, there's a tremendous tension to the Weiss side of the film, and while what writer Bruce Wagner has concocted is maybe not enough to fill a feature-length film as it is, it probably could be with a little more effort - it's got the makings of a Greek tragedy, and while many of the people involved are unstable in one way or another, their motivations still tend to be human and understandable. It's a fractious enough web of relationships on its own that the bits that involve Benjie being a self-centered brat of a child actor just seem little more than the latest time over some rather well-tread ground.
Full review on EFC
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal
I've spent some time grumbling about how we get a bunch of Chinese romances in theaters right now but seldom any action/adventure movies, which is a shame, because China does that better than many other places. I suspect that's the result of that being too well known - historically, American distributors would buy these movies up, probably for more than the Chinese studios are making for these day-and-date releases, not to mention getting on the festival circuit and getting a little more publicity there. Still, things are moving faster now, and this is the second action film in three months that Well Go has managed to get into American theaters just a couple weeks after it played China.
Interestingly, their logo didn't appear before the movie, although ones for Village Roadshow and Warner Brothers did, which always strikes me as funny - if big American studios finance a movie, why don't they just distribute it here as well? I kind of get that Warner isn't really set up for limited releases, but it's kind of their own fault for dismantling New Line, Warner Independent, Picturehoue, etc. rather than making use of them.
Anyway, the movie itself is fun, especially since it's one of the first times I've had the same sort of reaction to digital effects that I do to practical ones - not really caring about the shortcomings because I can feel the handcrafting. I tend to reject that sort of argument anyway, in part because I get very frustrated by people acting like anything done on a computer just involves pressing a "Do It" button, but the techniques certainly tend to yield different sorts of results. This has a real Ray Harryhausen feel, what with its crazy monsters and mythological underpinnings. Different mythologies, certainly, but that's sort of the fun.
Heck, it also reminded me of some of the old, genuinely weird movies Garo Nagoshi and Clinton McClung used to show at the Weekly Wednesday/Weekend Ass-Kickings, both in that it was taken from Chinese mythology with little explanation provided in the subtitles for us poor westerners and surprisingly violent for what seemed like a children's fantasy. Those were generally against a fairly featureless desert backdrop and represented Heavens and Hells in fairly abstract ways compared to this, but the DNA is the same. I knew this as soon as we cut to Zhong Kui trying to exorcise a pregnant woman only to have some giant Cerebus thing leap from he loins. It was a reverse angle, but, yikes!
I'll spare you this week's "photo taken of the end credits so I can get actor/character names", because I was darn lucky that the top-line people were even legible, what with the movie being in 3D and all.
Zhong Kui fu mo: Xue yao mo ling (Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD 3D)
Maybe the best way to describe Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (to give it the full name that appears on-screen) is to imagine if Ray Harryhausen had been born in China, making the sort of weird fantasies that were popular in Hong Kong in the 1970s, only he had access to twenty-first century CGI and performance capture. It's rough and all over the place, but also a fair amount of fun.
It takes place in and around the Tang Empire city of Hu, which is apparently right next door to Heaven and Hell. A once-a-millennium day of reincarnation is approaching, and local god Master Zhang Daoxian (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) has recruited lord Zhong Kui (Chen Kun) to slay demons, going so far as to sneak into Hell to retrieve the Dark Crystal, a repository of souls stolen by demons. The Demon King wants it back by the full moon, and has sent a performing troupe of demons led by chameleon Xi Wei (Summer Jike Juanyi) and Snow Girl Xue Qing (Li Bingbing) to retrieve it - made more complicated by the fact that Xue Qing is a spitting image of "Little Snow", a seemingly magical girl he met three years ago.
Six writers are credited here, along with researchers, and I've got no idea just how much they have skewed or mangled the mythological figures presented here. What they have done is to cram a lot of it into one movie, from gods to demons and shapeshifters to dragons, with a story that keys on how people have seven spirits and three souls. For all that is shown on screen, there is even more implied; Chinese mythology always seems to imply more levels to the world than one can imagine. The writers never quite make clear just exactly what the souls in the Dark Crystal actually do, although the ultimate stakes are made clear. There are parts of the movie that seem like they had an idea that just didn't fit with the rest of the story, and others where things are barely described - Xi Wei seems to be around or not in completely arbitrary manner.
Full review on EFC
Interestingly, their logo didn't appear before the movie, although ones for Village Roadshow and Warner Brothers did, which always strikes me as funny - if big American studios finance a movie, why don't they just distribute it here as well? I kind of get that Warner isn't really set up for limited releases, but it's kind of their own fault for dismantling New Line, Warner Independent, Picturehoue, etc. rather than making use of them.
Anyway, the movie itself is fun, especially since it's one of the first times I've had the same sort of reaction to digital effects that I do to practical ones - not really caring about the shortcomings because I can feel the handcrafting. I tend to reject that sort of argument anyway, in part because I get very frustrated by people acting like anything done on a computer just involves pressing a "Do It" button, but the techniques certainly tend to yield different sorts of results. This has a real Ray Harryhausen feel, what with its crazy monsters and mythological underpinnings. Different mythologies, certainly, but that's sort of the fun.
Heck, it also reminded me of some of the old, genuinely weird movies Garo Nagoshi and Clinton McClung used to show at the Weekly Wednesday/Weekend Ass-Kickings, both in that it was taken from Chinese mythology with little explanation provided in the subtitles for us poor westerners and surprisingly violent for what seemed like a children's fantasy. Those were generally against a fairly featureless desert backdrop and represented Heavens and Hells in fairly abstract ways compared to this, but the DNA is the same. I knew this as soon as we cut to Zhong Kui trying to exorcise a pregnant woman only to have some giant Cerebus thing leap from he loins. It was a reverse angle, but, yikes!
I'll spare you this week's "photo taken of the end credits so I can get actor/character names", because I was darn lucky that the top-line people were even legible, what with the movie being in 3D and all.
Zhong Kui fu mo: Xue yao mo ling (Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, RealD 3D)
Maybe the best way to describe Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (to give it the full name that appears on-screen) is to imagine if Ray Harryhausen had been born in China, making the sort of weird fantasies that were popular in Hong Kong in the 1970s, only he had access to twenty-first century CGI and performance capture. It's rough and all over the place, but also a fair amount of fun.
It takes place in and around the Tang Empire city of Hu, which is apparently right next door to Heaven and Hell. A once-a-millennium day of reincarnation is approaching, and local god Master Zhang Daoxian (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) has recruited lord Zhong Kui (Chen Kun) to slay demons, going so far as to sneak into Hell to retrieve the Dark Crystal, a repository of souls stolen by demons. The Demon King wants it back by the full moon, and has sent a performing troupe of demons led by chameleon Xi Wei (Summer Jike Juanyi) and Snow Girl Xue Qing (Li Bingbing) to retrieve it - made more complicated by the fact that Xue Qing is a spitting image of "Little Snow", a seemingly magical girl he met three years ago.
Six writers are credited here, along with researchers, and I've got no idea just how much they have skewed or mangled the mythological figures presented here. What they have done is to cram a lot of it into one movie, from gods to demons and shapeshifters to dragons, with a story that keys on how people have seven spirits and three souls. For all that is shown on screen, there is even more implied; Chinese mythology always seems to imply more levels to the world than one can imagine. The writers never quite make clear just exactly what the souls in the Dark Crystal actually do, although the ultimate stakes are made clear. There are parts of the movie that seem like they had an idea that just didn't fit with the rest of the story, and others where things are barely described - Xi Wei seems to be around or not in completely arbitrary manner.
Full review on EFC
Friday, February 27, 2015
A la Mala
This weekend's solution to the Mad Lib of "Hollywood doesn't make romantic comedies any more but ________ does" is, apparently, "Mexico".
Like the last couple of Mexican movies to pop up at Boston Common, A la Mala is distributed by Lionsgate's Pantelion label, although unlike Instructions Not Included and Cantinflas, any attempt to be Mexican-American is pretty minimal - there are a few English-language songs on the soundtrack, and some English-language phrases slip into the dialogue, but pretty much the whole thing takes place in Mexico City and Spanish is everyone's primary language.
I wonder how much that will help/hurt it at the box office. The 8pm preview show on Thursday night was just me and one other guy, neither of us Latino (well, I can't speak for him, but it wouldn't be my guess), and not being a regular at night-before screenings, I've got no idea how common that is. I suspect that it might make the picture a little harder to sell to a crossover audience, which is too bad; it's funny and genuinely charming.
I'm a little bit surprised that this was the Mexican movie that opened in Boston this weekend; Ana Maria in Novela Land seemed to be getting more publicity online and has more folks a non-Latino audience might recognize (Elizabeth Pena, Luis Guzman, Sung Kang). Maybe if this does well that will show up next week. Seems weird that they'd both target the same weekend, though.
A la Mala
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
There are a lot of romantic comedies that start from from premises as ludicrous as that of A la Mala, but few of them do as well in selling that starting point. It's a goofy little thing, but it's got a cute couple at the center and makes enough nimble steps along the way to be a great deal of fun.
The idea is that actress Maria Laura "Mala" Medina (Aislinn Derbez) has a side gig - she'll flirt with a woman's boyfriend or otherwise provide enough temptation and distraction for men to determine whether they're worth keeping around. It looks like she can quit when she aces an audition for a new television series, but its producer (Daniela Schmidt) demands one last gig - seduce and then dump her ex-boyfriend Santiago (Mauricio Ochmann), both making him understand how she felt and giving her a chance to swoop in and win her back. The trouble is twofold - Mala and Santiago have already met, and she winds up liking the guy.
That's close to the whole deal, and that's fine. The filmmakers don't undermine their premise's simplicity with subplots that don't matter, nor do they feel a particular need to throw additional challenges in Mala's and Santiago's way (there's actually something kind of clever about how the unwanted ex is built right into the setup, but in a way that doesn't require her to be visible and gate on the audience). Instead, director Pedro Pablo Ibarra and writers Issa Lopez & Ari Rosen spend the bulk of the movie on the pair getting to know and like each other, letting their chemistry fuel the movie without jerking the audience back and forth.
Full review on EFC
Like the last couple of Mexican movies to pop up at Boston Common, A la Mala is distributed by Lionsgate's Pantelion label, although unlike Instructions Not Included and Cantinflas, any attempt to be Mexican-American is pretty minimal - there are a few English-language songs on the soundtrack, and some English-language phrases slip into the dialogue, but pretty much the whole thing takes place in Mexico City and Spanish is everyone's primary language.
I wonder how much that will help/hurt it at the box office. The 8pm preview show on Thursday night was just me and one other guy, neither of us Latino (well, I can't speak for him, but it wouldn't be my guess), and not being a regular at night-before screenings, I've got no idea how common that is. I suspect that it might make the picture a little harder to sell to a crossover audience, which is too bad; it's funny and genuinely charming.
I'm a little bit surprised that this was the Mexican movie that opened in Boston this weekend; Ana Maria in Novela Land seemed to be getting more publicity online and has more folks a non-Latino audience might recognize (Elizabeth Pena, Luis Guzman, Sung Kang). Maybe if this does well that will show up next week. Seems weird that they'd both target the same weekend, though.
A la Mala
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
There are a lot of romantic comedies that start from from premises as ludicrous as that of A la Mala, but few of them do as well in selling that starting point. It's a goofy little thing, but it's got a cute couple at the center and makes enough nimble steps along the way to be a great deal of fun.
The idea is that actress Maria Laura "Mala" Medina (Aislinn Derbez) has a side gig - she'll flirt with a woman's boyfriend or otherwise provide enough temptation and distraction for men to determine whether they're worth keeping around. It looks like she can quit when she aces an audition for a new television series, but its producer (Daniela Schmidt) demands one last gig - seduce and then dump her ex-boyfriend Santiago (Mauricio Ochmann), both making him understand how she felt and giving her a chance to swoop in and win her back. The trouble is twofold - Mala and Santiago have already met, and she winds up liking the guy.
That's close to the whole deal, and that's fine. The filmmakers don't undermine their premise's simplicity with subplots that don't matter, nor do they feel a particular need to throw additional challenges in Mala's and Santiago's way (there's actually something kind of clever about how the unwanted ex is built right into the setup, but in a way that doesn't require her to be visible and gate on the audience). Instead, director Pedro Pablo Ibarra and writers Issa Lopez & Ari Rosen spend the bulk of the movie on the pair getting to know and like each other, letting their chemistry fuel the movie without jerking the audience back and forth.
Full review on EFC
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